... Thackeray and Kingsley both tried their hands at what, for the sake of a better and more comprehensive word, we call fairy-tales. The ' Rose and the Ring', and the 'Waterbabies', have become 'classics of the nursery ' and schoolroom, and for many years there have been floods of translations from Russian, Scandinavian, and Eastern sources, to say nothing of originals like 'Alice in Wonderland', or Lord Brabourne's and Mr. Andrew Lang's märchen. Mrs. Molesworth's Four-Winds Farm is a delightful book, and Mr. Oscar Wilde has written some very imaginative stories, perhaps more ethical in their suggestive meaning than we might have expected from a cynical dramatist. His House of Pomegranates is in some ways akin to Dr. George Macdonald's collection, but is more mystical and less purely fanciful. It is sumptuously decorated and illustrated by Mr. C. Ricketts and Mr. Charles Shannon, and in the descriptive passages by which the author seeks to emulate in words the patient skill of the medieval illuminator, we recognise the hand of a leader of the modern esthetic school. The following from 'The Young King' is a good specimen of Mr. Wilde's decorative word-painting:

Such passages after a while pall on the reader, as a banquet chiefly composed of luscious fruits and perfumed wines would pall on the appetite, and cause longings for a cool draught of water and the simple fare of childhood. The 'Birthday of the Infanta' is the best of the four stories in Mr. Wilde's volume; it has a less artificial air than the others, and the contrast between the stately Spanish children surrounded by their courtly retinue, and the dwarf who for the first time comes face to face with his own ugly misshapen image, and breaks his heart at the discovery, is both pathetic and dramatic. But after all, it is to the old ' nursery classics' that we return with renewed zest, and best among all collections of old-world lore is Grimm's Household Tales. It is a veritable storehouse of legend and fairy-tale, we find most of our friends there, Cinderella perhaps a little different from her English namesake, but, at least, not barbarously maltreated as by the late George Cruickshank, who turned her story into a temperance tract. It seems necessary to scientific minds to discover scientific reasons for everything that exists, even for fairy-tales, but it is enough for most people to realise that they are the heritage of children, who, as a rule, prefer the old ' wild tales' to the most elaborate preparation of modern invention.