The exiguous fragment of La Sainte Courtisane is the next unpublished work of importance.  At the time of Wilde’s trial the nearly completed drama was entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on purpose to restore it to the author.  Wilde immediately left the manuscript in a cab.  A few days later he laughingly informed me of the loss, and added that a cab was a very proper place for it.  I have explained elsewhere that he looked on his plays with disdain in his last years, though he was always full of schemes for writing others.  All my attempts to recover the lost work failed.  The passages here reprinted are from some odd leaves of a first draft.  The play is of course not unlike Salome, though it was written in English.  It expanded Wilde’s favourite theory that when you convert some one to an idea, you lose your faith in it; the same motive runs through Mr. W. H. Honorius the hermit, so far as I recollect the story, falls in love with the courtesan who has come to tempt him, and he reveals to her the secret of the Love of God.  She immediately becomes a Christian, and is murdered by robbers; Honorius the hermit goes back to Alexandria to pursue a life of pleasure.  Two other similar plays Wilde invented in prison, Ahab and Isabel and Pharaoh; he would never write them down, though often importuned to do so.  Pharaoh was intensely dramatic and perhaps more original than any of the group.  None of these works must be confused with the manuscripts stolen from 16 Tite Street in 1895—­namely the enlarged version of Mr. W. H., the completed form of A Florentine Tragedy, and The Duchess of Padua (which existing in a prompt copy was of less importance than the others); nor with The Cardinal of Arragon, the manuscript of which I never saw.  I scarcely think it ever existed, though Wilde used to recite proposed passages for it.

In regard to printing the lectures I have felt some diffidence:  the majority of them were delivered from notes, and the same lectures were repeated in different towns in England and America.  The reports of them in the papers are never trustworthy; they are often grotesque travesties, like the reports of after-dinner speeches in the London press of today.  I have included only those lectures of which I possess or could obtain manuscript.

The aim of this edition has been completeness; and it is complete so far as human effort can make it; but besides the lost manuscripts there must be buried in the contemporary press many anonymous reviews which I have failed to identify.  The remaining contents of this book do not call for further comment, other than a reminder that Wilde would hardly have consented to their republication.  But owing to the number of anonymous works wrongly attributed to him, chiefly in America, and spurious works published in his name, I found it necessary to violate the laws of friendship by rejecting nothing I knew to be authentic.  It will be seen on reference to the letters on The Ethics of Journalism that Wilde’s name appearing at the end of poems and articles was not always a proof of authenticity even in his lifetime.