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Writing about Oscar Wilde in "Truth," Mr Labouchere says — "I have known him, off and on, for years. Clever and witty he unquestionably is, but I have always regarded him as somewhat wrong in the head, for his craving after notoriety seemed to me a positive craze. There was nothing that he would not do to attract attention."

"When Wilde went over to New York he went about dressed in a bottle-green coat with a waist up to his shoulders. When he entered a restaurant people threw things at him. When he drove in the evening to deliver his lectures the windows of his carriage were broken, until a policeman rode on each side of it. Far from objecting to all this, it filled him with delighted complacency. ‘Insult me, throw mud at me, but only look at me,' seemed to be his creed."

"So strange and wondrous is Wilde’s mind when in an abnormal condition, that it would not surprise me (continues Mr Labouchere) if he were deriving a keen enjoyment from a position which most people, whether really innocent or guilty, would prefer to die rather than occupy. He must have known in what a glasshouse he lived when he challenged investigation in a court of justice. After he had done this he went abroad? Way did he not stay abroad? The possibilities of a prison may not be pleasing to him, but I believe that the notoriety that has overtaken him has such a charm for him that it outweighs everything else."

In the early days of the cult of aestheticism someone asked Oscar Wilde how a man of his undoubted capacity could make such a fool of himself. He gave this explanation. He had written, he said, a book of poems, and he believed in their excellence. In vain he went from publisher to publisher asking them to bling them out; not one would even read them, for he was known. In order to find a published he felt that he must do something to become a personality. So he hit upon aestheticism. It succeeded. People talked about him; they invited him to their houses as a sort of lion. He then took his poems to a published, who — still without reading them — gladly accepted them.