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252 Apparently instinct did not become sufficiently powerful to cry for appeasement until he became a student at Oxford. While one of the leaders in scholarship and already a society favorite, it was nevertheless being whispered that he was a pederast. This was due to his openness, he not seeming to care if every one knew of his penchant, and not realizing that he was guilty of anything scandalous.

Having graduated from Oxford with the highest honors, Wilde took up his residence in London. Unlike the author, he was capable cum femina, but did not marry until twenty-nine. Two sons resulted. Marriage and fatherhood are the two strongest arguments against him in any judgment on his pederasty.

Hardly another human being has at the age of thirty achieved such fame. In the family of the author, then a boy of ten, and living in a different country and 3,000 miles away, the name " Oscar Wilde" was a household term. Even every child of the village was as familiar with that name as with that of the man next door. This fame resulted from his being the idol of England's aristocracy, the greatest social light of the nineteenth century in any land, one of the most brilliant conversationalists that ever breathed, a poet of high rank, and the foremost English playwright of his generation.

But notwithstanding that during the late eighties and early nineties of the nineteenth century, Wilde was the most widely known and the most talked about man in London, he was so disdainful of the opinion of mankind as to visit regularly—not incognito, but under his own illustrious name —the leading maison publique of London