ABSTRACT
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.1 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.
