Wilde, like fellow Irishman and friend Yeats, was a brilliant oral storyteller, a temporally displaced bard. When he fell from grace during scandal in later life, he earned many a meal-and arranged many a loan---after ensuring an after dinner audience's affection with a good tale. It is largely from this practice that he initially achieved notoriety, and from jotting down the essence of his speech that he made his living- for Wilde, who often found …showed first 75 words of 1771 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1771 total…this can be attributed, like so much else, to his full-time acting role, which allowed him to not practiced what he preached, and even to not really care about whether he was a hypocrite or not. Or, perhaps it can be linked to the hardship that the family knew when William Wilde fell from grace as one of Dublin's most prominent men, financially and (to a degree) socially ruined by scandal, illness, and mental breakdown.