Page:Wilde - De profundis, 1915.djvu/17

 as you will remember from our correspondence, my own; for this I do not make any apology. Then, certain people (among others a well-known French writer) have paid me the compliment of suggesting that the text was an entire forgery by myself or a cento of Wilde's letters to myself. Were I capable either of the requisite art, or the requisite fraud, I should have made a name in literature ere now. I need say here only that De Profundis is a manuscript of eighty close-written pages on twenty folio sheets; that it is cast in the form of a letter to a friend not myself; that it was written at intervals during the last six months of the author's imprisonment on blue stamped prison foolscap paper. Reference to it and directions in regard to it occur in the letters addressed to myself and printed in this volume. Wilde handed me the document on the day of his release; he was not allowed to send it to me from prison. With the exception of Major Nelson, then Governor of Reading Gaol, myself, and a confidential typewriter, no one has read the whole of it. Contrary to a general impression, it contains nothing scandalous. There is no definite scheme or plan in the work; as he proceeded the writer's inten-