It was his own action, as even he himself seems to have vaguely realized beforehand, which brought the storm about his head.
He was arrested, tried, condemned, and at once there arose a general howl of execration, joined in even by the judge, whose attitude compared unfavorably with the more impartial attitude of the eighteenth century judges in similar cases.

Wilde came out of prison ambitious to retrieve his reputation by the quality of his literary work.

But he left Reading gaol merely to enter a larger and colder prison.

He soon realized that his spirit was broken even more than his health.

He drifted at last to Paris, where he shortly after died, shunned by all but a few of his friends.[92] In a writer of the first order, Edward Fitzgerald, to whom we owe the immortal and highly individualized version of _Omar Khayyam_, it is easy to trace an element of homosexuality, though it appears never to have reached full and conscious development.