Belfast News-Letter - Saturday, April 6, 1895

DUBLIN DAY BY DAY.
DUBLIN, FRIDAY NIGHT.

[...]Oscar Wilde had not from the beginning any more than at the end the smallest sympathy in Dublin, his native city. All the sympathy was for the eccentric Marquis of Queensberry, as the father trying to save his son from any part or lot in the horror which brought down Heaven's vengeance on the Cities of the Plain. Whether his imputation was or was not false in fact, nobody for a moment thought that it was inspired by malice, a fact which the law imputes where a statement is made, which, though believed at the time to be true, turns out to be false. Here, however, after the masterly cross-examination by his fellow-townsman and quondam friend, Mr. Carson, Q.C , taken together with his statement of the defendant's case, there could be but one opinion as to the result; and the imperturbable coolness, the flippant epigrams, and the audacious ideas so cleverly expressed by Oscar Wilde—in short, the Oscar Wilde pose, filled every right-thinking man with disgust, if not dismay. Tlie collapse of the case is a terrible fall for a man of the lofty ambitions of Oscar Wilde. Society will know him no more. Respect for the actors, doubtless, will prevent his plays from being hissed off the stage. The Oscar Wilde horror coming so close on the Tipperary horror must cause sorrow to Irishmen that such things can be. While it was right and proper that the Tipperary horror should be investigated in public, in the hope of putting an end to superstition, on the other hand it is a pity in the interests of morality and the sound health of mind and body of the rising generation that the case of Oscar Wilde was not heard with closed doors, or as the lawyers put it, in camera.