Excerpt from The Writings of Oscar Wilde

If pity, the sweet and desolate pity exhaled in every line of the poem entitled The Ballad of Reading Gaol, could have softened the wasted, wandering life of him who elected to be called Sebastian Melmoth, and paved the arduous, almost impossible, road whereon the Sisyphus-like task of regeneration was to have been attempted, it hap pily cannot be gainsaid that in Paris, the city of light and learning, there was no lack of heartfelt commiseration showered upon the ill-fated Napo leon of epigram. And pure and honest wielders of the pen, men with talent and position, albeit of another race and speaking another tongue, did not disdain to welcome the solitary giant, bent be neath the weight of former vice and perversion, accumulated by his own hand, self-murdered by the miserable mania that had seized and gripped him fast, despite the efforts of his reasoning self.

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