Italian student and jurist, born in Dublin, where his father was an Irish merchant, who, during an absence in America, had his property confiscated in the rebellion of 1798, and died in Baltimore four years later. The widow, a woman of cultivation and literary enthusiasm, removed to Augusta, GA, where her son became a lawyer and six times a representative in Congress after he had been attorney-general of the State. Later in life he removed to New Orleans to practice his profession, and died there while holding a professorship of law in the State University, on the 10th of September, a fortnight before entering his fifty-ninth year.
For five years from 1835 Mr. Wilde was in Italy, chiefly in Florence, enjoying especial official opportunities of research, and it was at his instigation that Giotto’s portrait of Dante in the Bargello palace was released from its cover of whitewash. He published Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso (New York, 1842), embodying original studies on the poet’s career and enlivened by lyrical translations of some of the sonnets. Later he wrote of Petrarch, and in a volume called Hesperia and posthumously published (1867), there was gathered together a collection of translations from several Italian poets, with an ambitious metrical composition of his own. His criticism is inseparable from his antiquarian research, his acumen is fresh, his taste rather refined than vigorous, and his enthusiasm for Italian literature rare in his adopted country. His theory of Tasso is that the poet feigned madness to cover his passion for Leonora d’Este, which the Duke of Ferrara discovered and resisted,—a theory repudiated by Symonds. One of his most familiar lyrics, “My Life is Like a Summer Rose,” was rendered into Greek by an Oxford scholar and passed for an ode of Alcæus, but Horace Binney, Jr., detected and established Wilde’s originality. See also Literary Criticism.
