I chaffed him about this one day and he admitted the snobbishness gaily.
"I love even historic names, Frank, as Shakespeare did.

Surely everyone prefers Norfolk, Hamilton and Buckingham to Jones or Smith or Robinson." As soon as he lost his editorship he took to writing for the reviews; his articles were merely the _resume_ of his monologues.

After talking for months at this and that lunch and dinner he had amassed a store of epigrams and humorous paradoxes which he could embody in a paper for _The Fortnightly Review_ or _The Nineteenth Century_.
These papers made it manifest that Wilde had at length, as Heine phrased it, reached the topmost height of the culture of his time and was now able to say new and interesting things.

His _Lehrjahre_ or student-time may be said to have ended with his editorship.

The articles which he wrote on "The Decay of Lying," "The Critic as Artist," and "Pen, Pencil and Poison"; in fact, all the papers which in 1891 were gathered together and published in book form under the title of "Intentions," had about them the stamp of originality.