Page 411.  In fairness to Gide:  Gide is describing Wilde after he had come back from Naples in the year 1898, not in 1897, when he had just come out of prison.

Appendix Page 438 Line 20.  Forgive me if I say it, but I think your method of sneering at Curzon unworthy of Frank Harris.  Sneer by all means; but not in that particular way.

[Robert Ross is mistaken here:  no sneer was intended.  I added Curzon’s title to avoid giving myself the air of an intimate.  F.H.]

Page 488 Line 17.  You really are wrong about Mellor’s admiration for Wilde.  He liked his society but loathed his writing.  I was quite angry in 1900 when Mellor came to see me at Mentone (after Wilde’s death, of course), when he said he could never see any merit whatever in Wilde’s plays or books.  However the point is a small one.

Page 490 Line 6.  The only thing I can claim to have invented in connection with Wilde were the two titles “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” for which let me say I can produce documentary evidence.  The publication of “De Profundis” was delayed for a month in 1905 because I could not decide on what to call it.  It happened to catch on but I do not think it a very good title.

Page 555 Line 18.  Do you happen to have compared Douglas’ translation of Salome in Lane’s First edition (with Beardsley’s illustrations) with Lane’s Second edition (with Beardsley’s illustrations) or Lane’s little editions (without Beardsley’s illustrations)?  Or have you ever compared the aforesaid First edition with the original?  Douglas’ translation omits a great deal of the text and is actually wrong as a rendering of the text in many cases.  I have had this out with a good many people.  I believe Douglas is to this day sublimely unconscious that his text, of which there were never more than 500 copies issued in England, has been entirely scrapped; his name at my instance was removed from the current issues for the very good reason that the new translation is not his.  But this is merely an observation not a correction.

[I talked this matter over with Douglas more than once.  He did not know French well; but he could understand it and he was a rarely good translator as his version of a Baudelaire sonnet shows.  In any dispute as to the value of a word or phrase I should prefer his opinion to Oscar’s.  But Ross is doubtless right on this point.  F.H.]

Appendix Page 587.  Your memory is at fault here.  The charge against Horatio Lloyd was of a normal kind.  It was for exposing himself to nursemaids in the gardens of the Temple.

[I have corrected this as indeed I have always used Ross’s corrections on matters of fact.  F.H.]

Page 596 Line 13.  I think there ought to be a capital “E” in exhibition to emphasise that it is the 1900 Exhibition in Paris.

THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM