A Peep into the Past by Max Beerbohm — Read

Oscar Wilde! I wonder to how many of my readers the jingle of this name suggests anything at all? Yet, at one time, it was familiar to many and if we search back among the old volumes of Punch, we shall find many a quip and crank out at its owner's expense. But time is a quick mover and many of us are fated to outlive our reputations and thus, though at one time Mr. Wilde, the old gentleman, of whom we are going to give our readers a brief account, was in his way quite a celebrity; today his star is set, his name obscured in this busy, changeful city.

Once a welcome guest in many of our Bohemian haunts, he lives now a life of quiet retirement in his little house in Tite Street with his wife and his two sons, his prop and mainstay, solacing himself with many a reminiscence of the friends of his youth, whilst he leaves his better-known brother, William, to perpetuate the social name of the family. Always noted for his tenacious memory, it is one of the old gentleman's keenest pleasures to regale a visitor from the outer world with stories of the late Mr. Frank Niles, Mr. Godwin, the architect, Mr. Robert Browning or the Earl of Lytton, who was not the only member of the upper ten thousand to honour Mr. Wilde with his personal friendship. "All, all are gone, the old familiar faces" and with the quiet resignation of one who knows that he is the survivor of a bygone day, Mr. Wilde tends more and more to exist in its memory or to solace himself with the old classics of which he was ever so earnest a student, with his Keats and his Shakespeare, his Joseph Miller and the literal translations of the Greek Dramatists. Not that he is a mere _laudator temporis acti_, a bibliophile and nothing more. He still keeps up his writing, is still the glutton for work that he always was. He has not yet abandoned his old intention of dramatising Salome and the amount of journalistic matter that he quietly produces and contributes anonymously to various periodicals is surprising. Only last year an undergraduate journal called the _Spirit Lamp_ accepted a poem of his in which there were evidences that he has lost little of his old talent for versification.