It seems to me that both combine to give a realistic photograph, so to speak, of Sir William and Lady Wilde.

An artist, however, would lean to a more kindly picture.

Trying to see the personages as they saw themselves he would balance the doctor's excessive sensuality and lack of self-control by dwelling on the fact that his energy and perseverance and intimate adaptation to his surroundings had brought him in middle age to the chief place in his profession, and if Lady Wilde was abnormally vain, a verse-maker and not a poet, she was still a talented woman of considerable reading and manifold artistic sympathies.
Such were the father and mother of Oscar Wilde.
FOOTNOTES: [2] As he has died since this was written, there is no longer any reason for concealing his name: R.Y.Tyrrell, for many years before his death Regius Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin..