OSCAR WILDE would have enjoyed his appearance in this large paper edition of 575 numbered copies in dull blue boards with white paper labels, chaste as a set of Wedgwood china.[1] "I must try to live up," he might have said, "to my wide margins." He would have liked the note of ducal luxury in his personal marks on the binding: the small gold sunflower under his name in the upper left-hand corner and the seal at the center, symbolic of his literary conquests, bearing the lion rampant, the fleur-de-lis, and the harp of Erin. He would have been gratified, too, by the company of friends and critics who bring their tribute of roses and thorns to this edition of his works.
The æsthetic movement which Wilde was ultimately to mislead into unseemly places was, in its earlier pre-Raphaelite phase, conspicuous for its chivalric Arthurian reminiscences and for "the white feet of angels coming down the golden stair." (Oscar Wilde subsequently gilded the feet.) And so the general introduction is appropriately by Richard Le Gallienne, whose head and halo-like hair pleased Wilde by reminding him of the angel in Rossetti's "Annuncia-
- ↑ The Writings of Oscar Wilde, New York: Gabriel Wells, 12 vols, 1924.
