Earlier in his review, Wilde had excused the authors, even praised them, for trying to “annex the domain of the painter” through their aesthetic choices in paper color and binding, but here he suggested that plagiarism was a transgression far worse than that. One reason was that, although the appropriation of colors from the painters led to beauty in the finished product, the plagiarized lines simply resulted in terrible poetry: the difference between the five-petaled tulip and the three-petaled tulip. This contrast was heightened through Wilde’s positive assessment of Irwin’s collection, which, as he put it, “gains her colour effect from the poet not from the publisher.” In Irwin’s poems, Wilde certainly witnessed traces of Matthew Arnold’s works, but he nonetheless praised Irwin for “studying a fine poet without stealing from him, a very difficult thing to do, and though many of the reeds through which he blows have been touched by other lips, yet he is able to draw new music from them.” In other words, even when learning lessons from a master it was the case that the epigone might transform evident echoes of his idol into innovative art. Such is the meaning that underscores the epigraph to this essay; to transmute and to improve source material, in Wilde’s view, was a perfectly legitimate approach to literary creativity.