Wilde's pose as an aesthete was all the more effective because he himself was a very large man, more than six feet three inches tall. Although he seldom engaged in sports, he was quite strong and known as a good boxer. Sir Frank Benson, himself an athlete at Oxford, reported in his memoirs that only one man in the college "had a ghost of a chance in a tussle with Wilde." On one occasion, four undergraduates entered Wilde's room and broke up his furniture. Wilde caught them in the act, booted out one, doubled over a second with a punch, tossed a third in the air, and carried the fourth to the man's own room, where Wilde invited spectators to join him in sampling the would-be-ruffian's wines and spirits.
On tour, Wilde took special delight in meeting ordinary people. (Remember that many of the accounts of these meetings come from Wilde's letters to friends and relatives back home, and he was never one to allow boring facts to get in the way of a good story.) One of his favorite visits, a highlight of the trip, was to Leadville, Colorado, high in the Rocky Mountains, and to a silver mine called "Matchless." Wilde read passages from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, the sixteenth-century Italian artist who was an eminent silversmith. Wilde said that the gun-toting miners were disappointed that he had not brought Cellini with him. When Wilde reported that the artist was dead, one of the miners asked, "Who shot him?"
Another visit, to the state penitentiary in Lincoln, Nebraska, produced observations made ironic by Wilde's own incarceration thirteen years later. Wilde's letter home spoke of the horrifying existence and the mean-looking men, adding in a letter to Helen Sickert, "I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face." He did ask the inmates if they read and what they read. It gave him pause when he discovered that some were devoted to Shelley and Dante. Wilde himself would later read Dante in prison.
