Mr Oscar Wilde has put together a few elegant literary trifles in a tasteful—perhaps we should say æsthetic—little volume under the title of Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories. The stories are ingeniously constructed and delicately finished, and charmingly defiant of fictional use and wont. Lord Arthur Savile's story is what may for the nonce be called an idyllic tragedy. It opens in Lady Windermer's crowded drawing-room among the lions and the duchesses. The prize lion of the evening is Mr Pogson, a cheiromantist. Among other hands submitted to him is Lord Arthur's. At the first glance his face becomes a picture of horror, but he evidently keeps back the cause of his emotion, and says but a few commonplace things. Sir Arthur afterwards privately extracts from him th efact that he had read murder in his hand. He is shocked at first, and being a man of punctilious honour, and never doubting that he must commit murder, he concludes that it is his duty to give up Sybil Merton. It would be wrong to ask her to marry a man doomed to be a murderer. On reflection it occurs to him that if the murder ould be got well over and done with, he might then marry Sybil without dread of the future. His mind is soon made up, and he fixes on a suitable victim. His well-laid plan fails, and he tries again. As on the first occasion, he lays his plan very ingeniously so that the victim may be killed without risk to himself, or any bloody business wrought by his own hand. Again th eplot miscarries. After two failures he is disgusted, and inclined to give way to despair ; but walking along the Thames Embankment he comes suddenly on Pogson, the cheiromantist, seizes him instantaneously, and hurls him into the river. Pogson is supposed to be a suicide. Lord Arthur has got it over. He goes off in hot haste and wants to marry Sybil next day; does marry her soon, and lives happily ever afterwards. He is always a devout believer in cheiromancy, to which, he says, he owes all the happiness of his life. It may seem hardly fair to the author to give this outline of his story, but there is no other way of giving a notion of his method. The story, like those that follow, is amusing and full of smart things. It is just credible that underneath its playful form there lurks a deep satire upon fashionable society ; or, perhaps, the fun is directed against the current fashions of fiction. Whether the story is a satire, a parody, or merely a piece of elegant fooling, it is an amusing trifle enough ; and what is said of one is said of all the trifles in this book.