Oscar Wilde renewal. He immediately wrote to the Society of Jesus requesting a six-month Catholic retreat; when the request was denied, Wilde wept. "I intend to be received into the Catholic Church before long", Wilde told a journalist who asked about his religious intentions. He spent his last three years impoverished and in exile. He took the name "Sebastian Melmoth", after Saint Sebastian and the titular character of "Melmoth the Wanderer" (a Gothic novel by Charles Maturin, Wilde's great-uncle). Wilde wrote two long letters to the editor of the "Daily Chronicle", describing the brutal conditions of English prisons and advocating penal reform.
William Melmoth Walters William Melmoth Walters William Melmoth Walters (1835-1925) was a former President of the Incorporated Law Society (1891-1892) and member of an old Somerset family. Walters was the eldest son of John Eldad Walters of Lincoln's Inn and Eleanor, daughter and co-heiress of Alexander Radclyffe Sidebottom. He was a nephew-in-law of Sir Christopher Rawlinson. Walters was a descendant of William Melmoth, the poet William King and a relation of Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon. On 17 July 1860, he married Marian Eleanor, eldest child of Alfred Leggatt, Esq. He was the father of the famous amateur footballers Arthur Melmoth Walters