In the manuscript diary of Evert A. Duyckinck, under the date April 16, 1844, there occurs the following entry:

I called upon Wikoff and was well satisfied with the further statement of his plans for the Republic. It is to publish a well filled judicious paper on the London standard. He has made the most liberal arrangements for reporters, correspondence, at home and abroad. Thackeray, for instance—Fitzboodle, Titmarsh etc. of Fraser—is his Paris correspondent.

I called upon Wikoff and was well satisfied with the further statement of his plans for the Republic. It is to publish a well filled judicious paper on the London standard. He has made the most liberal arrangements for reporters, correspondence, at home and abroad. Thackeray, for instance—Fitzboodle, Titmarsh etc. of Fraser—is his Paris correspondent.

Niclas Müller, obscure printer, minor poet, and earnest patriot, belonged to the band of Forty-Eighters, whose love of liberty led them to transplant their ideal from the fallow soil of the old world to the fertile fields of the new, where, finding it flourish and flower, they were not content to enjoy its fruits by themselves but sought to share them with others who had as yet not tasted them. A typical member of this consecrated band, Müller, in the words of the Reverend Charles Timothy Brooks, had “always been at hand during the struggles for liberty on both sides of the water,” having been involved in both the German Revolution of 1848 and the American Civil War. As publicist and poet he supported the liberal movement in Germany and the abolition movement in America. “He wrote,” Brooks remarked, “several stirring songs during our war.” Foremost among them was a cycle of sonnets entitled Zehn gepanzerte Sonnete, Mit einer Widmung an Ferdinand Freiligrath, und einem Nachklang: “Die Union, wie sie sein soll,” Von Niclas Müller, Im November 1862 (New York, Gedruckt und zu haben bei Nic. Müller, 48 Beekman St.), which Brooks himself translated into English but never published.

The following letter by Oscar Wilde, generously sent to me by Professor Waldo H. Dunn of Scripps College, may be of interest to the readers of my article, “Oscar Wilde and the Devil's Advocate,” published in the September 1944 number of PMLA, for it seems to be a pretty direct confirmation by Wilde himself of some of the speculations which I made concerning Wilde's splitting himself into different and often antithetical persons in his published works. So far as Mr. Dunn and I can discover, this letter seems never to have been printed. Mr. Dunn tells me that he found it in the Alexander Turnbull Library (now the National Library) in Wellington, New Zealand, when he was working there in 1932–33; and the holograph is presumably still there. The founder of the library, he says, “was a really great collector, and purchased letters, rare books, and proof sheets with discrimination.”

In his “Changes of Aspect” (printed for the first time in my article in PMLA, lviii [March, 1943], 223–244), Swinburne writes: “A writer on whom I have lavished what many judges consider an extravagant exuberance of praise has put on record his verdict that a man who never changes his opinion is like standing water—he breeds reptiles of the mind” (op. cit., p. 230). Since my article appeared I have been able to trace the allusion to Blake's “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: “… I found myself … hearing a harper …, and his theme was: ‘The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind’.” (The Poems and Prophecies of William Blake, Everyman's I ibrary, p. 51.)