and Bosie: A Most Unlikely Friendship on the letters between Shaw and Douglas. One of Douglas's final public appearances was a well-received lecture to the Royal Society of Literature on 2 September 1943 on The Principles of Poetry, published in an edition of 1,000 copies. He attacked the poetry of T. S. Eliot; the talk was praised by Arthur Quiller-Couch and Augustus John. Harold Nicolson described his impression of Douglas after meeting him at a lunch party in 1936: In the book, Secret Historian, Samuel Steward (a professor, poet, and novelist) wrote in his diary that he met Lord Douglas when Douglas was 67; Steward was 27. Lord Douglas professed that he was beyond "sins of the flesh," yet ends up in bed with Steward. Douglas proclaims that Wilde and he did little more than kiss and find other men for each other. Douglas's only child, Raymond, was diagnosed at the age of 24 with schizoaffective disorder in 1927, and entered St Andrew's Hospital, a mental institution. Though decertified and discharged after five years, he suffered another breakdown and returned to the hospital. In February 1944, when his mother died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 70, Raymond was able to attend her funeral, and in June he was again decertified. His conduct rapidly deteriorated, and he returned to St Andrew's in November, where he stayed until his death on 10 October 1964. Death Douglas died of congestive heart failure in Lancing, West Sussex, on 20 March 1945 at the age of 74. He was buried on 23 March at the Franciscan Friary, Crawley, alongside his mother, who had died on 31 October 1935 at the age of 90. They share a gravestone. The elderly Douglas, living a reduced life in Hove in the 1940s, appears in the diaries of Henry Channon and in the first autobiography of Donald Sinden, whose son Marc Sinden claimed his father was one of only two people at the funeral. In fact the funeral report in The Times named some 20 mourners, including Sinden, with "other friends". He died at the home of Edward and Sheila Colman, who were the main beneficiaries in his will, inheriting the copyright to his work. Writings Douglas published several volumes of poetry and two books about his relationship with Wilde, Oscar Wilde and Myself (1914, largely ghost-written by T. W. H. Crosland, assistant editor of he