146 Oscar Wilde. "I Never Walk" [1894 



all those present, and they were most of them brilliant talkers, he was 

 without comparison the most brilliant, and in a perverse mood he chose 

 to cross swords with one after the other of them, overpowering each in 

 turn with his wit, and making special fun of Asquith, his host that day, 

 who only a few months later, as Home Secretary, was prosecuting him 

 on the notorious criminal charge which sent him to hard labour in 

 prison. I remember, too, as a characteristic trait of his dandyism, that 

 when at the end of the half hour we remained on talking, we went 

 away together from the door, I to walk back to my rooms in Mount 

 Street, and he to pay a visit in the same direction, hardly farther. I 

 said, " We will walk together as far as Grosvenor Square." " No, 

 no," he said, and called a passing hansom. " I never walk." 



This was the end of my London season, and the only extracts I can 

 find in my diary at all of a public character, which was otherwise de- 

 voted entirely to the social care of amusement and launching Judith in 

 the world. It is a record especially of dinners that I gave, and which 

 were for a moment rather the fashion with the Soul society at my 

 rooms in Mount Street. 



" 25th July. — Crabbet. With Judith on a pilgrimage to see Huxley 

 at Eastbourne. He lives in a new house he has built near the cliff and 

 with Beachy Head behind it. He was very cordial and pleasant, and 

 his wife, an excellent old soul, most kind to Judith. We had only two 

 hours with him but we talked all the time about the origin of the 

 Arabian horse, and I think I got from him all the information he had 

 to give. He said that in reality nothing was known at all clearly except 

 that horses were unknown in Egypt under the fourth dynasty, that 

 there had been a close connection with Arabia, and that if there had been 

 horses in Arabia there would have been horses also in Egypt, but how 

 they eventually came to Arabia was mere guesswork. Arabia had 

 doubtless been in former times well watered, and it was possible a wild 

 horse might have been isolated there in the South (this was my sugges- 

 tion) long after the drying up of the northern plateaux, but the his- 

 torical evidence, such as there was, was against it. We might expect 

 something from the cuneiform records when thoroughly examined. 

 Pietrement's theories were merely speculative. 



" Of the human race in Egypt he said that he had long suspected a 

 common origin for them with the Dravidians of India, perhaps a long 

 belt of brown-skinned men from India to Spain in very early days. Of 

 savage races, he said he had no sympathy with them ; he considered 

 there was more difference between the man of the criminal class in 

 London at the present day and the high type of educated thinker, than 

 between the Australian savage and, say, the average man of the time 

 of Elizabeth. ' Yet,' I objected, ' I suppose you could educate your 



