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London, April 4– The prosecution in the libel suit brought by Oscar Wilde against the Marquis of Queensberry was concluded to-day, after Wilde has been under cross examination yesterday and to-day altogether for six hours. He was briefly put under the redirect by his counsel before resting his case. In opening for the defense, Mr. Carson, counsel for the marquis, bitterly arraigned Wilde and stated the nature of the defense which will be an attempt to prove the charges which Queensberry made in the libel alleged. Most of the London papers are printing the testimony of the suit almost verbatim. The St. James Gazette is an exception and had taken a stand editorially against such publication.

During the course of his remarks in opening the defense, Mr. Carson alluded in complimentary terms in the course of Mr. Beerbohm Tree in forwarding to the plaintiff a copy of the anonymous letter handed to the English actor, whereupon Justice Collins said: "There is no occasion to mention the name of Mr. Beerbohn Tree."

Mr. Carson, in reply, remarked, "Nor should I do so, my lord, had it not been that I received a cable message from Mr. Tree to-day, asking that his connection with the case be fully explained."

"Every one understands that Mr. Tree’s connection with the case is in every way honorable and praiseworthy." said the justice, in conclusion.

Wilde returned to the court room for a few minutes before adjournment. Among the letter produced in court and addressed by the Marquis of Queensberry to his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, was one saying that Wilde was "a cur and a coward." Such was the interest taken in the proceedings that the services of an extra force of police were required outside the Old Bailey in order to disperse the large crowds which assembled in the neighborhoood in order to see the principals in this notorious case.

Special Dispatches to the CHRONICLE.

LONDON, April 4. -- There was unabated interest to-day at the Old Bailey in the taking of the testimony in the suit for libel brought by Oscar Wilde against the Marquis of Queensberry. The audience was largely composed of lawyers and reporters. There were a few notable persons present.

The plaintiff arrived at an early hour and took a seat at the table reserved for solicitors. The Marquis of Queensberry entered a few minutes later, looking jaunty and confident. Several of his friends shook the defendant's hand as he entered the dock.

Oscar Wilde, upon resuming his place on the witness stand, admitted that had attended tea parties in the rooms of a man named Taylor, which were artistically furnished and in which perfumes were burning. He denied, however, that he had seen Taylor in a woman's costume. Further questions upon the part of Mr. Carson, counsel for the Marquis of Queensberry, brought forth the admission that Taylor had introduced to Wilde five youths to whom Wilde gave money and took to a restaurant.

The plaintiff admitted that he was not aware that one of them was a valet and another a coachman, or that Taylor had been arrested in a raid on a house on Fitzroy square.

Wilde, in his answers to the questions, exhibited confusion and contradicted himself frequently. He also lost his temper. Carson's questions were pitiless.

Carson's cross-examination of the plaintiff was concluded at noon, having lasted over six hours.

Sir Edward Clarke, counsel for Wilde, then examined his client by putting in certain letters from the Marquis of Queensberry in which he called upon his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, to cease his "infamous intimacy" with the plaintiff, saying his "blood turned cold at the sight of their infamous faces." He added: "I hear that Wilde's wife will petition for a divorce on the grounds of unnatural crimes. If you do not cease letting him disgrace us, I shall feel justified in shooting him on sight."

To this letter Lord Alfred replied: "What a funny little man you are."

After the noon recess the crowd in the courtroom was larger than ever, and the hall and stairs leading to it were filled ten deep with well-dressed men.

Wilde kept the Court waiting ten minutes for which he apologized to Justice Collins, saying he had been consulting his doctor.

After the production of other letters the case for the plaintiff was closed and Carson began his speech for the defense. It was terribly denunciatory of Wilde, who left the courtroom as soon as counsel for the defendant began to speak.

Lord Alfred Douglas was present in court a short time during the morning, but did not return in the afternoon.

The speech of Mr. Carson for the defense lasted until court adjourned at 5 P. M., and was not then finished. He reviewed the evidence, point by point, denounced Wilde, and said the witnesses he would produce would prove beyond any doubt the guilt of the plaintiff.

Mr. Carson alluded in complimentary terms to the course of Beerbohm Tree in forwarding to the plaintiff a copy of an anonymous letter handed the English actor, whereupon Justice Collins said:

"There is no occasion to mention Beerbohm Tree's name."

Carson, in reply, remarked: "Nor should I do so, my Lord, had it not been that I received a cable message from him to-day asking that his connection with the case be fully explained."

"Everyone understands Mr. Tree's connection with the case. It is in every way honorable and praiseworthy," said the Justice in conclusion.

Wilde returned to the courtroom a few minutes before adjournment.

Among the letters produced and addressed by the Marquis of Queensberry to his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, was one saying that Wilde "was a cur and a coward of the worst type."

Most of the newspapers are printing the testimony in the suit almost verbatim, as they did in the Crawford-Dilke and Colfn-Campbell cases.

OSCAR'S NEW STORY. "THE GREEN CARNATION" LED TO THIS SUIT. All the Characters in the Scandal Are in It-Some of Its Paradoxes.

Oscar Wilde's latest book, "The Green Carnation," is said to have precipitated the libel suit now on trial in London. There is no doubt that Oscar wrote the book, though he adopted the scheme of issuing it anonymously. In this story Oscar poked fun at the Marquis of Queensberry, and it was this ridicule which overflowed the cup of the sporting peer. All the prominent characters in the present scandal appear in "The Green Carnation," and a glance at its main features may be interesting in this connection.

The hero is Lord Reginald Hastings, familiarly known as Reggie. It is an open secret that this character is drawn from Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquis of Queensberry, the boy on whose account the Marquis had his row with Oscar Wilde. There is just a passing allusion, by the way, to the Marquis himself as "an elderly gentleman with a red face and small side whiskers." who draws from the dutiful youngster the remark, "What a pity my poor father is so plain!"

Reginald himself is not at all plain. He is marvelously beautiful, and he knows it. He is described as looking like some angel in a church window, designed by Burne Jones, a little lase from the injudicious conduct of his life. He is quite frankly conscious of his charms. "About the magic of his personality he could never be induced to tell a lie." And then the author drops into epigrams, which have all the cold and glittering sheen of the Oscar Wilde school.

"It is so interesting to be wonderful," he cries; "to be young, with pale gilt hair and blue eyes, and a face in which the shadows of fleeting expressions come and go, and a mouth like the mouth of Narcissus. It is so interesting to oneself.

"Surely one's beauty, one's attractiveness, should be one's own greatest delight. It is only the stupid and those who still cling to Exeter Hall as to a Rock of Ages who are afraid or ashamed to love themselves, and to express that love if need be. Reggie Hastings, at least, was not ashamed. The mantelpiece in his sittingroom bore only photographs of himself, and he explained this fact to inquirers by saying that he worshipped beauty. Reggie was very frank."

Here is Reggie's attempt at self-analysis: "When I'm good it's my mood to be good; when I am what is called wicked it is my mood to be evil. I never know what I shall be at a particular moment. Sometimes I like to sit at home after dinner and read 'The Dream of Gerontius.' I love lentils and cold water. At other times I must drink absinthe and hang the night hours with scarlet embroideries. I must have music and the sins that march to music.

"There are moments when I desire squalor, sinister, mean surroundings, dreariness and misery. The great nnwashed mood is upon me. And then I go out from luxury The mind has its West End and its Whitechapel. The thoughts sit in the park sometimes and sometimes they go slumming. They enter narrow courts and rookeries. They rest in unimaginable dens, seeking contrast, and they like the ruffians whom they meet there, and they hate the notion of policemen keeping order. The mind governs the body. I never know how I shall spend an evening till the evening has come. I wait for my mood."

Oscar Wilde figures under the name of Esme Amarinth. He is described as a tall and largely built man, with a closely shaven, clever face and rather rippling brown hair. At times his face wear an expression of seraphic sensuality. Here is how he discourses to his apt pupil:

"To commit a perfect sin is to be great, Reggie, just as to produce a perfect picture, or to compose a perfect sympathy is to be great. Francesco Cenci should have been worshiped instead of murdered. But the world can no more understand the beauty of sin than it can understand the preface to 'The Egoist,' or the simplicity of 'Sordello.' Sin puzzles it; and all that puzzles the world frightens the world; for the world is a child, without a child's charm, or a child's innocent blue eyes. How exquisitely colored these strawberries are, yet if Sargent painted them he would idealize them, would give to them a beauty such as nature never yet gave to anything.

"So it is with the artist in sinning. He improves upon the sins that nature has put, as it were, ready to his hand. He idealizes, he invents, he develops. No trouble is too great for him to fake, no day is too long for him to in. The still and black-robed night hours find him toiling to perfect his sin; the weary white dawn, looking into his wear, white face through the shimmering window panes, is greeted by a smile that leaps from sleepless eyes. The passion of the Creator is upon him.

"The man who invents a new sin is greater than the man who invents a new religion, Reggie. No Mrs. Humphrey Ward can snatch his glory from him. Religions are the Aunt Sallies that men provide for elderly female venturists to throw missiles at and to demolish. What sin that has ever been invented has ever been demolished? There are always new human beings springing into life to commit it and to find pleasure in it. Reggie, some day I will write a gospel of strange sins, and I will persuade the S. P. C. K. Society to publish it in dull, misty scarlet, powdered with golden devils."

Here the pupil interrupts. "Oh, Esme, you are great!" he cries. And Amarinth, with large, fat satisfaction, replies: "How true that is! And how seldom people tell the truths that are worth telling!"

The great Esme is fond of talking with a cheerful insouciance of domestic affairs. Here is his account of his own marriage:

"My wife proposed to me, and I refused her. Then she went and put up some things called banns, I believe. Afterward she sent me a white waistcoat in a brown paper parcel, and told me to meet her at a certain church on a certain day. I declined. She came in a hired carriage-a thing like a large, deep bath, with two enormously fat, parti-colored horses-to fetch me. To avoid a scene I went with her, and I understood that we were married. But the color of the window behind the altar was so atrocious, and the design-of Herodius carrying about the head of John the Baptist on a dish-so inartistically true to life, that I could not possibly attend to the service."

When somebody suggests that marrying has not changed him, he replies:

"I have not allowed it to. My wife began by trying to influence me, she has ended by trying not to be influenced by me. She is a good woman, Reggie, and wears large hats. Why do good women invariably wear large hats? To show they have large hearts? No, I am unchanged. That is really the secret of my pre-eminence. I never develop. I was born epigrammatic, and my dying remark will be a paradox. How splendid to die with a paradox upon one's lip!"

Oscar Wilde has two sons. So has Esme. "I have two boys and their uneasiness about my past is as keen as my uneasiness about their future. I am afraid they will be good boys. They are fond of cricket and loathe reading poetry. That is what Englishmen consider goodness in boys."

In a sermon in praise of folly which he delivers to the village choir-boys, Mr. Amarinth makes a humorous summary of his own life-his and Oscar Wilde's.

"I am an artist in absurdity," he tells his open-mouthed auditors, "a human being who dares to be ridiculous. I practice the exquisite art of folly, an art that will in the future take rank with the arts of painting, of music, of literature. I was born to be absurd. I have lived to be absurd. I shall die to be absurd; for nothing can be more absurd than the death of a man who has lived to sin, instead of having lived to suffer. I married to be absurd; for marriage is one of the most brilliant absurdities ever invented by a prolitic imagination.

The green carnation which gives the title to the book is a freak invented by Oscar Wilde. It is merely the natural flower dyed by means of arsenic. It is worn by his satellites, aimless young men of fashion like Lord Douglas, who are glad to seize upon any fad that will make them talked about. It is supposed to be a constant reminder of the fact that art is superior to nature. Yet nature, as Mr. Wilde in real life and Mr. Amarinth in this book explain, will probably soon begin to imitate it.

"She always imitates everything, being naturally inventive." The carnation is the badge of the followers of the higher philosophy, which is thus described by Reggie to a lady:

"The philosophy to be afraid of nothing, to dare to live as one wishes to live, not as the middle classes wish one to live; to have the courage of one's desires, instead of only the cowardice of other people's."

"Mr. Amarinth is the high priest of this philosophy, I suppose?" asks the lady.

"Esme is the bravest man I know," says Reggie, taking some marmalade. "I think sometimes that he sins even more perfectly than I do. He is so varied. And he escapes those absurd things, consequences. His sin always finds him out. He is never at home to it by any chance."

The story is packed with the eprigrams Oscar loves. Here are a few: "I shall go to the French plays. I like them-they always do me so much harm." "The refining influence of a really good woman is as corrosive as acid." "It is very difficult to be young, especially up to the age of 30." "I once did a good action. When I was very young I married the only man who did not love me."