With rare unselfishness, or, if you will, with Celtic clannishness, he did a good deal to make Oscar's name known.
Every clever thing that Oscar said or that could be attributed to him, Willie reported in _The World_.

This puffing and Oscar's own uncommon power as a talker; but chiefly perhaps a whispered reputation for strange sins, had thus early begun to form a sort of myth around him.
He was already on the way to becoming a personage; there was a certain curiosity about him, a flutter of interest in whatever he did.

He had published poems in the Trinity College magazine, _Kottabos_, and elsewhere.

People were beginning to take him at his own valuation as a poet and a wit; and the more readily as that ambition did not clash in any way with their more material strivings.
The time had now come for Oscar to conquer London as he had conquered Oxford.

He had finished the first class in the great World-School and was eager to try the next, where his mistakes would be his only tutors and his desires his taskmasters.