MY DEAR MR. WYNDHAM,—To the critic it is indeed fortunate just at this season of the year when the flood of Christmas literature is upon us, that the ingenuity of man has invented one wide and comprehensive adjective which may be safely used to describe every product of the professional bookmaker issued in its brilliant binding by the ever-increasing army of publishers. The word "seasonable," however, is scarcely ever more mis-applied than in its application to literature. Of "seasonable" literature this year there is none. Of seasonable books there are a few waifs and strays, mere flotsam and jetsam thrown up by the sea of publication. Not that this fact detracts at all from the value of the volumes that will presently be welcomed by the coming generation with eager glances and warm words of thanks either as Christmas gifts or hard-won prizes that will be lasting memento of a half-year's work. In reality it is only to some of the books for the very little ones that the distinctive adjective may be truthfully employed, books such as that in which Jules Garnier illustrates with such fidelity and grace the many scenes which make up the circus entertainment(¹), or the pictorially-told stories of "Red Riding Hood" and "Cinderella"(²), whose claim to be so considered dates from the time when the first novelist sitting by his pile of blazing logs, whispered his fancies to the ailing little one that sheltered upon his breast from the cold winds. Perhaps it is because the elder children would resent being dosed with Santa Claus stories, because they are cynically critical upon the great question of ghosts, indifferent to the weird effects of snow pictures, that the scenes of the seasonable stories of to-day are nearly all laid in torrid lands, while the spooks have some more scientific foundation than the night-wanderers were accustomed to have but a few years ago. The glamour of ghosts has departed, and to-day young England is fed upon tales of derring-do and adventure that would have made mythological heroes quake in their sandals had they been asked to perform them. Not that all are of this stamp. There is one volume whose leaves will be carelessly turned by many an indifferent hand as it lies on the drawing-room table. It looks so like the adult picture-book that it requires an effort to sit down and read it. "The House of Pomegranates"(³) is so finely printed, its architecture, so to speak, so perfect, that one feels instinctively that it is a sort of show building, not for workaday use. Nevertheless, it is not so. Let it but pass into the children's hands, and its value will be more easily gauged. They will live the fabled lives of the inmates of this enchanted house. Mr. Wilde will have made so plain to them, with his simple, direct English, a new world of beauty, that they will straightway enter in and take possession. A book it is which one should read young, that as years go by one could enter into a fuller appreciation of it. It would be possible to dream for hours over a book of this sort, and awake soothed and refreshed, but imagine a slumber in which the dramatis [personae] of a Mashonaland romance held dream-carnival. The "Fossicker,"(⁴) who gives his title to the volume, is a gold-seeker, who has found and made his home in the veritable Ophir, and the adventures of the heroes who seek his retreat would put a Stanley to the blush. There is enough compressed adventure therein to have supplied at least half-a-dozen volumes, and it is given in such a taking form that you might imagine the author to be a recruiting-sergeant in the employ of the Chartered Company. In spite, however, of its hair-breadth escapes, it just lacks that air of reality which the boy's classic must possess, and which makes him believe in "Robinson Crusoe," a new edition of which has just been published by Messrs. Cassell(⁵). Of course, there is nothing remarkable in that. Crusoe's reincarnation is more than annual, but this time he cannot slip by the crowd without notice, for the volume is [illustrated] with illustrations that would give life to a far less notable character, and in this case are worthy of the subject.