I wanted a figurehead for my petition, and the figurehead I had chosen I could not get.

I began to wonder and doubt.

I next approached a very different man, the late Professor Churton Collins, a great friend of mine, who, in spite of an almost pedantic rigour of mind and character, had in him at bottom a curious spring of sympathy--a little pool of pure love for the poets and writers whom he admired.

I got him to dinner and asked him to sign the petition; he refused, but on grounds other than those taken by Meredith.
"Of course Wilde ought to get out," he said, "the sentence was a savage one and showed bitter prejudice; but I have children, and my own way to make in the world, and if I did this I should be tarred with the Wilde brush.

I cannot afford to do it.