A rumour was spread abroad the other day that the great Oscar had cut his hair and donned the frock coat of respectability. This dainty little volume proves that with shearing of his locks his great strength---his wit and his humour---has not gone out of him. The stories are gems, but the dazzling facets are not too many; in short (as Mr Micawber used to say), the style is not, as of yore, overloaded with epigram. There are some pretty inventions scattered through the volume too. 'The inordinate passion for pleasure, which is the secret of remaining young', is not so good as 'women over lifesize', but it will pass; so will 'The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding', and 'The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast'. The title-tale, 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime', is saved by its humour from being a 'horrible'. The young man, who is about to be married, is told by a cheiromantiat that his hand indicates that he must murder a relative, and after a night of agony he 'sets about the jab, The details are a little gruesome, but there is unmistakable humour in the relation of his Lordship's failures, each of which necessitates a further postponement of his wedding; and the dénouement would be clever were if not that the victim who dress the murderers weird, unfortunately does net satisfy the conditions---he is not a relative; but the greatest novelists make slips like that. The tone of another of the stories is rollicking fun, with an undertone of somewhat cheap pathos. It relates the efforts of an American diplomatist and his family to lay a real ancestral, aristocratic, English ghost, and is most amusing. The Yankees take the phantom seriously but calmly, rub out his pet bloodstains with Pinkerton's Paragon Detergent, and offer him an equally efficacious lubricant for his chains. But the book is worth buying for the working out of the plot. One morsel demands quotation. Having expressed a dislike to America, the ghost is asked satirically if the reason is because America has no ruins and no 'curiosities. 'No ruins! No curiosities!' answered the spirit, 'you have your navy and your manners'.