Abstract

At the beginning of the sixth paragraph of ‘The Rise of Historical Criticism’ (1879), written for the Chancellor’s Essay Prize at Oxford, Wilde gives a phrase in French: ‘L’esprit d’un siècle ne naît pas et ne meurt pas à jour fixé.’1 In the editorial commentary to her recent Oxford edition of Wilde’s critical essays, Josephine M. Guy translates the sentence, but comments that she had been ‘unable to find a source for this phrase’.2 The source is Victor Cousin, coming from the twelfth lesson of his Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie (1829): ‘L’esprit d’un siècle, Messieurs, ne meurt pas et ne naît pas à jour fixe.’3 Cousin is cited by name on two other occasions elsewhere in the essay and in one of these, the Cours is again quoted, in a passage which Wilde copied out in his Oxford Notebook during the period.4

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