The Admirable Crichton is a comic stage play written in 1902 by J. M. Barrie. Barrie took the title from the sobriquet of a fellow Scot, the polymath James Crichton, a 16th-century genius and athlete. The epigram-loving Ernest is probably a caricature of the title character in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The plot may derive from Robinson's Eiland, an 1896 German play by Ludwig F...