A Treat for the colonies.

Waikato Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1514, 18 March 1882, Page 4

A Treat for the colonies.

It is no uncommon thing for the popular lecturer who has been "starring it" on American platforms to continue his journey to the Australian colonies. Mr Archibald Forbes pioposcs to do this, and the colonists may be congratulated on the treat in store for them. There is some idea that a lesser celebrity who has just crossed the Atlantic to lecture will extend his trip in the same way. But it is very doubtful whether Australian and New Zealand audiences will care to listen to Mr Oscar Wilde. So far he has met with but little success in the United States, and it is indisputable that he has excited much ridicule. His appearance upon the platform in Court dress, with the regulation " tights," his cadaverous countenance, his monotonous utterance of long-winded platitudes, these appear to have at first amused, then grievously < j>ored his hearers, many of whom left the hall before the completion of the lecture. 'Mr DOyly Carte, who "runs him," will hardly find that Mr Wilde is so good a ."speculition as Mr Forbes. After all Mr IWilde, with no peculiar gifts of elocution,

lias nothing particular to say. He is a self-constituted apostle of a schrol which has gained a certain notoriety from the attacks made upon it by those seeming detractors who, in seeking to ridicule, were really acting as puffs. But for Funch Mr Wilde" would hardly have emerged from the obscurity into which he must ere long return. — Home News.