OSCAR WILDE DEAD. ENGLISH POET AND AUTHOR WHO VISITED THIS COUNTRY. Started the Sunflower Craze Among the Aesthetics, Returned Home and Became a Degenerate. WAS IMPRISONED TWO YEARS THEN WENT TO FRANCE AND LIVED IN THE LATIN QUARTER. Died in an Obscure Hotel with Lord Alfred Douglas at His Bedside—Other Deaths.

DUBLIN, Nov. 30.—A dispatch to the Evening Mail from Paris says Oscar Wilde is dead. The dispatch adds that he expired in an obscure house in the Latin Quarter from meningitis, and was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed.

PARIS, Nov. 30.—Wilde had been living in a hotel on the Rue des Beaux Arts, where he had been known for several months under the name of Manmoth. For some time he had been indisposed. In October he was obliged to submit to a serious operation, from the effects of which he never recovered. He died at 2 o'clock this morning at the Maison du Pierier, an obscure hotel, in the presence of Lord Alfred Douglas.

The Journal says it is rumored that Wilde committed suicide.

Oscar Wilde, the son of Sir W. R. W. Wilde, was born in 1858. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and in 1878 got the Newdigate prize for his poem "Ravenna." In 1881 he published "Poems;" in 1891, "The House of Pomegranates;" in 1893, "Lady Windermere's Fan," a play; in 1894, "A Woman of No Importance," "Intentions" and "Salome," the latter a translation from the French; in 1895 a novel, "Dorian Grey." He was known as the leader of the aesthetic school. Wilde visited and lectured in America in 1882 and 1883 and started the "sunflower" craze and various other phases of his esthetic cult. He was known, somewhat satirically, as "The Apostle of Beauty and Languidness," and it is related of him that on one occasion he entered a Chicago restaurant at the dinner hour and ordered a bouquet of Parma violets. When they came he buried his nose in them for a few minutes, got up with the remark, "I have dined," threw the startled waiter a gold piece and walked out. He was satirized under the guise of "Postlethwaite" by Du Maurier, and was the original of "Bunthorne" in Gilbert's opera of "Patience." In 1896 he was sentenced to two years at hard labor for vicious practices, and since his release from prison has lived in close retirement, usually in France, and under an assumed name.