This sumptuous volume of stories by Mr. Oscar Wilde is a welcome Christmas visitor. The elaborate design and decoration of the book is the joint work of Mr. C. Ricketts and Mr. C.H. Shannon. We cannot say that the outside altogether pleases us, but the interior is artistically a thing of beauty. The thick creamy satin paper, the peatuiful type meandering within a wide meadow of margin, the equisite illustrations, the delicate diaphanous visions depicted on plates prefixed to each story—all minister to that sense of beauty which Mr. Wilde has done so much to stimulate. Mr. Wilde here appears as a story-teller pure and simple, narrator of things that never were, but that enchant us just the same—or rather very much more—taking us, as they do, out of the sordid grime of the present into some fairy-like realm of the imagination, where, nevertheless, the groundwork and elements of human passion—love, fear, happiness, remorse, fidelity, courage—are presented to us disconnected from troublesome psychological and ethical problems, and we see the essential factors of human life in simple combinations. One is reminded of such a masterpiece of story-telling as 'The Early Paradise,' by this volume of Mr. Wilde's. One is verse and the other prose, but there is the same simple directness of narrative, the same force of language, the same frank delight in sensuous beauty, in colour, form, and sound, and brooding over all the same sense of sympathy and pity. The four tales are quite separate, but they may be said to be united in one way, for they are all informed with the one idea of love as the great bond of union, the great solvent of human problems, the healing and purifying power of life. Mr. Wilde rightly holds that art should be loved for its own sake and not for any moral to be wrenched out of it by the analytic rack and thumb-screw, and we are far from desiring to compress these charming romantic essences into moral pills and potions. Yet there is a kind of spiritual inference to be made from each of these stories; and that inference is, 'Give all to love.'

The first story in the volume is that of "The Young King," a child of the old King's only daughter by a secret marriage with a stranger beneath her in station: a noble boy, wild-eyed and open-mouthed like a brown woodland faun. He is discovered in his beautiful apartment on the night before his coronation day. He sinks down on his bed, on the silk coverlet of which are embroidered pale poppies, "as though they had fallen from the tired hands of sleep," and he dreams. He is no longer in his palace, but in a low attic, where gaunt weavers bend over their looms, and pale children, whose faces are pinched with famine and whose thin hands tremble, are working in the foul and heavy air. The King speaks to a weaver, who tells him he works for a master who is a man just like himself, with this difference, "that he wears fine clothes while I go in rags, and that while I am weak from hunger he suffers not a little from overfeeding." And the King learns with terror that these miserable people are actually weaving his own coronation robe.

He wakes to find the great honey-coloured moon hanging in the dusky air, and then sleeps and dreams again. This time he is on the deck of a galley rowed by slaves chained together, the burning sun scorching their naked backs, and negroes lashing them with whips of hide. The youngest of them is sent down into the sea to dive for pearls. When he comes up his face is deadly pale, the blood gushing from ears and nostrils. "He quivered for a little, and then he was still. The negroes shrugged their shoulders and threw the body overboard." And then the King learns that the precious pearl this wretched victim brought from the depths of the sea is for his own sceptre. He cries, wakes, then falls asleep and dreams again.

He now sees men toiling in a dark forest filled with poisonous flowers and adders, tearing up the rocks with axes, and Avarice and Death watching them from a dark cavern. Death wants a third of them, but Avarice will not give any up. Whereon Death scatters blight, fever, and pestilence around, "and out of the slime at the bottom of the valley crept dragons and horrible things with scales;" and the young King is told that these wretched men are searching for rubies for his own crown. The royal boy with his wild eyes, offspring of a love other than the conventional arrangements royalty recognises, cannot endure this. On the coronation day when the robe, crown, and sceptre are brought to him he orders them away, puts on a leather tunic and rough cloak, and a spray of wild briar for a crown. He is mocked as the King's fool and thrust from the cathedral portals by the soldiers. The old Bishop remonstrates, but he presses on to the altar and stands before the image of Christ. And there, through the painted windows came the sunlight streaming upon him. "The gates of the jewelled shrine flew open, and from the crystal of the many-rayed monstrance shone a marvellous and mystical light. He stood there in a King's raiment, and the glory of God filled the place, and the Saints in their carven niches seemed to move." The people fell on their knees, the organ pealed forth its music, and the young King was not only King, but hero, prophet, angel.

The second story of this pretty volume is of "The Birthday of the Infanta." In the revels that take place mingles and acts a little dwarf, who has been purchased from his father, a poor charcoal-burner. The young Infanta is so amused by him that she flings him a white rose which she has worn in her hair. The little dwarf, ignorant alike of the ways of Princesses and of his own lack of comeliness, supposes she loves him, and he dreams of the happy life they will have in the forest, and of how he will guard over her and be her devoted slave. Eager to see her, he pushes his way into the palace and passes through splendid halls, but finds her not. Ultimately he comes to a mirror, which first reveals to him what an ugly mis-shapen abortion he is, and his vision of happiness is gone.

The Infanta comes in at the moment and finds her amusing dwarf lying on the ground in agony, with the petals of the rose she had flung to him torn in pieces around him. His sobs grow fainter and fainter, till they cease and he is still. The Chamberlain puts his hand on the dwarf's heart, and finds that it has ceased to beat. The Infanta frowns and cries in a pretty pet, "For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts." With which significant command this story ends.

We have not left ourselves space to tell about the other two stories—"The Fisherman and his Soul" and the "Star Child." The former turns on a fisherman preferring the love of a mermaid to his own soul, which a young witch enables him to get rid of. The latter tells of a child wrapped in a gold vestment found by two poor wood-cutters in a forest, and taken by one of them home. The child repays his kindness with cruelty and disdain, and grows up selfish and wicked, denying and outraging his own mother, who comes to him in the guise of a poor beggar-woman. He repents, grows merciful, seeks her over the earth, suffers, and yet, while suffering, redeems his own soul by acts of kindness, and finally finds his father and mother, and the kingdom to which he is heir.

All through these charming tales Mr. Wilde revels in descriptive colouring which, merged in the texture of the story, makes the book inwardly as well as outwardly beautiful, and a dominating sympathetic imagination pervades it all.