16 MAY 1969, Page 31

This kind of thing must stop

Sir: Your correspondent Mr Barry Humphries in his review of M lumen's Oscar Wilde (9 May) misquotes. The full quatrain misrecalled by his elderly actor in Australia runs as follows, and was (to my knowledge) cited at Oxford in the early 1920s as by Byron of a young homo- sexual at Oxford who suddenly died:

'Here Winstanley attends his God Not earth to earth but sod to sod. It was for creatures such as this That Hell was created bottomless.'

Se non f vero it has at least the true Byronic touch. The late Kingsley Martin never tired of reciting it.

Graham Hutton 38 Connaught Square, London, W2