Oscar Wilde - Miscellanies

Reverently some well-meaning persons have placed a marble slab on the wall of the cemetery with a medallion-profile of Keats on it and some mediocre lines of poetry. The face is ugly, and rather hatchet-shaped, with thick sensual lips, and is utterly unlike the poet himself, who was very beautiful to look upon. ‘His countenance,’ says a lady who saw him at one of Hazlitt’s lectures, ‘lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had the expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight.’ And this is the idea which Severn’s picture of him gives. Even Haydon’s rough pen-and-ink sketch of him is better than this ‘marble libel,’ which I hope will soon be taken down. I think the best representation of the poet would be a coloured bust, like that of the young Rajah of Koolapoor at Florence, which is a lovely and lifelike work of art.

It is perhaps not generally known that there is another and older peacock ceiling in the world besides the one Mr. Whistler has done at Kensington. I was surprised lately at Ravenna to come across a mosaic ceiling done in the keynote of a peacock’s tail – blue, green, purple, and gold – and with four peacocks in the four spandrils. Mr. Whistler was unaware of the existence of this ceiling at the time he did his own.

An Unequal Match , by Tom Taylor, at Wallack’s Theatre, New York, November 6, 1882.

‘Make’ is of course a mere printer’s error for ‘mock,’ and was subsequently corrected by Lord Houghton. The sonnet as given in The Garden of Florence reads ‘orbs’ for ‘those.’