This incisive judgment of an able and fairly impartial contemporary observer[2] corroborates, I think, the inferences which one would naturally draw from the newspaper accounts of the trial.  It seems to me that both combine to give a realistic photograph, so to speak, of Sir William and Lady Wilde.  An artist, however, would lean to a more kindly picture.  Trying to see the personages as they saw themselves he would balance the doctor’s excessive sensuality and lack of self-control by dwelling on the fact that his energy and perseverance and intimate adaptation to his surroundings had brought him in middle age to the chief place in his profession, and if Lady Wilde was abnormally vain, a verse-maker and not a poet, she was still a talented woman of considerable reading and manifold artistic sympathies.

Such were the father and mother of Oscar Wilde.

FOOTNOTES: 

[2] As he has died since this was written, there is no longer any reason for concealing his name:  R.Y.  Tyrrell, for many years before his death Regius Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin.

CHAPTER II

The Wildes had three children, two sons and a daughter.  The first son was born in 1852, a year after the marriage, and was christened after his father William Charles Kingsbury Wills.  The second son was born two years later, in 1854 and the names given to him seem to reveal the Nationalist sympathies and pride of his mother.  He was christened Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde; but he appears to have suffered from the pompous string only in extreme youth.  At school he concealed the “Fingal,” as a young man he found it advisable to omit the “O’Flahertie.”

In childhood and early boyhood Oscar was not considered as quick or engaging or handsome as his brother, Willie.  Both boys had the benefit of the best schooling of the time.  They were sent as boarders to the Portora School at Enniskillen, one of the four Royal schools of Ireland.  Oscar went to Portora in 1864 at the age of nine, a couple of years after his brother.  He remained at the school for seven years and left it on winning an Exhibition for Trinity College, Dublin, when he was just seventeen.

The facts hitherto collected and published about Oscar as a schoolboy are sadly meagre and insignificant.  Fortunately for my readers I have received from Sir Edward Sullivan, who was a contemporary of Oscar both at school and college, an exceedingly vivid and interesting pen-picture of the lad, one of those astounding masterpieces of portraiture only to be produced by the plastic sympathies of boyhood and the intimate intercourse of years lived in common.  It is love alone which in later life can achieve such a miracle of representment.  I am very glad to be allowed to publish this realistic miniature, in the very words of the author.