THE PRIEST AND THE ACOLYTE [1]
THE
PRIEST
AND
THE
ACOLYTE [3]
WITH AN
INTRODUCTORY
PROTEST BY
STUART MASON
LONDON: AT THE LOTUS PRESS
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND SEVEN
Introductory Protest
SO [5] many copies of “The Priest and the Acolyte” have been sold by unscrupulous publishers and booksellers under the implication that it is the work of Oscar Wilde that it has been thought good to issue this edition with the object of putting an end, once and for all, to the possibility of purchasers being misled as to the authorship.
The story was originally published in The Chameleon, the [6] ]first and only number of which appeared in December, 1894. The author of the story was an undergraduate at Oxford, “an insufficiently birched schoolboy,” as he has recently been described, and he alone was responsible for the contents of the magazine which he edited. At the time of the trial of Lord Queensberry for libel a few months later it was attempted to show that Oscar Wilde not only approved of the theme of the story, but that he was actually a party to the publication of it, on the grounds that he sent to the editor a number of aphorisms under the title of “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.”