allegations were made by Douglas in Plain English and later at a public meeting in London. A false report of a crushing British naval defeat had indeed been planted in the New York press by German interests, but by this time (after the failure of his Dardanelles Campaign) Churchill was unconnected with the Admiralty. As the attorney general noted in court on Churchill's behalf, there was "no plot, no phoney communiqué, no stock market raid and no present of fine furniture". In 1924, while in prison, Douglas echoed Wilde's composition of De Profundis (From the Depths) during his incarceration and wrote his last major poetic work, In Excelsis (In the Highest) in 17 cantos. Since the prison authorities would not allow Douglas to take the manuscript with him on his release, he had to rewrite the work from memory. Douglas maintained that his health never recovered from his harsh prison ordeal, which included sleeping on a plank bed without a mattress. Later life Douglas's feelings towards Wilde began to soften after Douglas's own incarceration in 1924. He wrote in Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up, "Sometimes a sin is also a crime (for example, a murder or theft), but this is not the case with homosexuality, any more than with adultery." In 1933 he gave a talk about poetry to the Catholic Poetry Society on 'The Catholic attitude to certain poets.' Of Wilde, Douglas said: 'Many years [after Wilde's death] and after I had become a Catholic, I reacted violently against him...Converts are very apt to be censorious and to be more Catholic than Catholics...I hope I am now more charitable and broad-minded than I was...After swinging to two extremes in my estimate of Wilde I have now got into what I believe to be the happy mean.' Similarly, in 1935 he wrote to the theatre manager Norman Marshall regarding Marshall's proposed production of a play about the Wilde scandal, closing his letter, 'Devoted as I still am and always will be to the memory of this brilliant and wonderful man and conscious as I am and always shall be about my own failings...Wilde was the author of what I consider to be, apart from Shakespeare, the finest comedy in the English language.' Throughout the 1930s and up to his death, Douglas kept up correspondence with many people, including Marie Stopes and George Bernard Shaw. Anthony Wynn based his play Bernard