We fear that Mr. Oscar Wilde's enemies (supposing him to be capable of possessing any) must have seen in this handsome book a deliberate provocation to the bourgeois au front glabre. Amid the pomegranates and other trimmings on the cover, there is a back view of a peacock which looks for all the world like that of an elderly spinster with her hands behind her back, and her profile turned towards the beholder. Mr. Shannon and Mr. Ricketts have sprinkled the pages with devices rare and strange in the latest and straitest school of Neo-Preraphaelitism, and the chief illustrations in the book are of a most absolute fancy. Mr. Wilde has, we observe, protested in the public press against the judgment that they are invisible, and, strictly speaking, they are not. But being printed in very faint grisaille on very deeply cream-tinted plate paper, they put on about as much invisibility as is possible to things visible, and as they are arranged, neither facing letterpress nor with the usual tissue guard, but with a blank sheet of paper of the same tint and substance opposite them, a hasty person might really open the leaves and wonder which side the illustration was. Nevertheless, we rather like them, for when you can see them, they are by no means uncomely, and they suit their text---a compliment which we are frequently unable to pay to much more commonplace instances of the art of book illustration. In the case of the text, also, hasty judgment is likely to be unduly harsh judgment. The pomegranates that compose the house---the grains that make up the pomegranate would have been a better metaphor---are four in number, and are all tales of the Märchen order, though one is something even more of a fabliau than of a Märchen. This is called 'The Birthday of the Infanta', and tells, to put it very shortly, how a certain little Spanish princess had an ugly dwarf who loved her, and died of a broken heart when he found out, not only how ugly he himself was, but how his beloved mistress thought of him as nothing but a fantastic toy. 'Tis an ower true tale. But we are not sure that Mr. Wilde's manner of telling it is quite the right one. The first and the last of the four, 'The Young King', and 'The Star Child', are pretty enough moralities; the first of halfmediaeval, half-modern Socialist strain. The other tells how a child was cured of cruelty, partly by some metaphysical aid, partly (we do not know whether Mr. Wilde intended to draw this part of the moral, but he has) by sound beatings and a not excessive allowance of bread and water.

But the third piece, 'The Fisherman and his Soul', is much longer, as long, indeed, as any two of them, and to our fancy a good deal better. It tells how a fisherman fell in love with a mermaid, and, to gain her, consented to part with, but not in the ordinary fashion to sell, his soul; how after a time he grew weary of his happiness, went to look after his soul, and found her, divorced as she was from his or any heart, a rather unpleasant, not to say immoral, companion; how he in vain endeavoured to return once more to his mermaid and only found her dead, when he and she and the soul were reunited once for all; and how, when the dead bodies of the pair were found and buried in unhallowed ground, there came a miracle converting to charity the heart of the parish priest who had cast them out. The separate ingredients of the piece are, of course, not very novel; but, to tell the truth, the separate ingredients of a story of this kind hardly can be, and Mr. Wilde has put them together with considerable skill, and communicated to the whole an agreeable character. The little mermaid is very nice, both when she is caught literally napping, and when she sings, and when she explains the necessity of her lover parting with his soul if he will have her. Also the young witch (to whom, when the parish priest has, not unnaturally, declined to unsoul him, the fisherman goes) is pleasing. She had red hair, and in gold tissue embroidered with peacock's eyes and a little green velvet cap she must have looked very well. The Sabbath, too, is good (there are too few Sabbaths in English), though the gentlemanly Satan is not new. Good, too, is the business-like manner in which the fisherman separates his soul from him by a device not impossibly suggested by one Adelbert von Chamisso, a person of ability. The adventures of the discarded and heartless soul are of merit, and it is a very good touch to make the fisherman's final, and hardly conscious, desertion of his mermaid-love turn on nothing more than a sudden fancy to dance, and the remembrance that she had no feet and could not dance with him. It is particularly satisfactory to learn that the mermaid's tail was of pearl-and-silver. There has been an impression in many circles that mermaids' tails are green, and we have always thought that it would be unpleasant to embrace a person with a green tail. But pearl-and-silver is quite different.