There is a glut of description and epithet in Mr. Oscar Wilde's book of fairy tales which leaves the reader with a strong sense of having fed on lucent syrup tinct with cinnamon, and baring bad too much of it. No language can compare with it except Ouida's when she is giving an inventory of the properties environing one of her heroines. Few basal ideas in fairy stories can bear this treatment; certainly not Mr. Wilde's. To make matters worse, ho has chosen to relate them in 4 style paraphrasing Scripture, which gives to the whole the air of complexity aping simplicity without success. The weird decorations sown with studied carelessness among the margins heighten this effect, as do also the medieval illustrations and the Grosvenor-Gallery covers Mr. Wilde seems, on the whole, to have taken bis stories something over-solemnly. In a less ostentatious se ting [sic], certain really poetic ideas found floating about in the volume would have gone further towards redeeming the inconsequent and spasmodic construction. The descriptions, in the opening story, of the weaving of the King's robe 'on the loom of Sorrow and by the white hands of Pain', 'the blood in the heart of the Raby, and Death in the heart of be Pearl', have shuddering force, and are among the few things in the book that leave an afterglow in the mind.