Mr. Oscar Wilde and his coadjutors, Messrs. Ricketts and Shannon, have exhausted the resources of bizarre decoration in 'A House of Pomegranates', which being interpreted means a quartet of märchen. The book, clad in white linen, with peacocks and arabesques and all sorts of things, is printed on plate paper. Its four, principal illustrations, one for each tale, are executed in such very faint grisaille that even in strong daylight they are not easily decipherable, while artificial illumination makes the page look a blank. There is a profusion of head and tail pieces, often very pretty, not to mention occasional devices scattered over the, angles of the page and everywhere, The inevitable drawback of this sort of thing is that after it one comes to talk and think of the text as 'letterpress'. It says something for Mr. Wilde that his text is nearly if not quite good; enough to banish this injurious appellation from the reader's mind. The tales, dedicated collectively to the author's wife and individually to four other ladies---Lady Brooke, Mrs, Grenfell, the Princess of Monaco, and Miss Margot Lennant,---are, as we have said, märchen, stories of the kind which the Germans invented or resuscitated from its grave in medieval legends, stories with a dash of the supernatural, a strain of pathos, and a suspicion here and---there of persiflage. They are really good of their kind. The best is, we think, 'The Fisherman and his Soul', which is also the most elaborate. The fisherman parts with his soul (though not in the ordinary way) to gain a soulless mermaid, and joins it again only to find---that the mermaid keeps his heart. This is also the most original. 'The Infant's [sic] Birthday', in which a hideous little dwarf dies when he becomes conscious of his ugliness, is very [?]. 'The two others, 'The Young King' and 'The Star Child', are nearer the common or Hans Andersen variety.