The Cromwell Argus - Tuesday, June 18, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
Occasional Notes.
Had Oscar Wilde been an exalted personage, born in the purple, a blue-blooded plutocrat of ancient lineage, a duke or a marquis, say, I nurture the belief that he would not have been sentenced to two year's imprisonment with hard labor. The law has at intervals to put its foot down and make an example of some one, so why not Oscar? He may be descended from Jonathan Wild, but, like the Smiths has added an e to his patronymic. 'Tis the blood that tells even yet in merry old England. The law is even-handed of course; no one would dispute that; but John Giles and Plantagenet Vere-de-vere, as human beings, are very widely separated. Opportunities are not given to all alike. Giles is easily found and brought to trial; Plantagenet's place of concealment is undiscoverable. "Give me blood!" How often have I missed some of the good things of this world through not being "somebody's cousin." As for Oscar, the aesthete, society will soon forget him; he is gone to a place where there is no social distinction, I should imagine. Should his aesthetic soul yearn for a lily, its yearning will, probably, be quite disregarded. Knapping stones, and picking oakum are stern realities for a man of "culchaw." There is nothing chaste or beautiful in a prison life, nothing to inspire the epigrammatist, nothing to "live up to," no dado-moulding. Sèvres, or articles of vertu, everything inartistic, bald, flat and inelegant. Deuced rough on Oscar!