His short stories are all written in a lighter vein--we peruse them as we eat a plover's egg, and with the same relish and appreciation. They are things of gossamer, but gossamer will oft survive more solid material, and has the supreme quality of delicacy. "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" deals with that nobleman's anxiety to commit the murder a cheiromantist has predicted he will perpetrate, and to get the matter over before he marries the girl to whom he is engaged. His two successive failures and his final drowning of the hand-reading fortune-teller is conceived in the best spirit of comedy, and provokes a gentle continuous ripple of amusement as we read it. The same may be said of "The Sphinx without a Secret," and "The Canterville Ghost," whereas the "Model Millionaire" is simply a pretty story wittily told. The whole plot is summed up in its concluding lines "Millionaire models are rare enough ... but model millionaires are rarer still." But, incomparably, Wilde's best work in fiction is the "Portrait of Mr W. H." as the _Blackwood_ article is headed. After reading it our regret becomes all the more poignant that the complete MS. of the book should have so unaccountably disappeared. Correctly speaking, the story is hardly a work of fiction, or, at anyrate, the fiction is so slight as to be hardly deserving of criticism, and is a mere medium for the exposition of a theory. The teller of the story is in a friend's rooms, and the talk drifts on to literary forgeries. The friend (Erskine) shows him a portrait-panel of a young man in late sixteenth-century costume, and proceeds to tell him his story. A young friend of his had discovered what he considered a clue to the identity of the Mr W. H. of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the only hitch being the difficulty of proving that the young actor to whom he asserted his poems were written, ever existed. He shortly afterwards produced a panel-portrait of the young man which he had, as he alleged, discovered clamped to the inside of an old chest picked up by him at a Warwickshire farmhouse. This final proof quite convinced Erskine of the genuineness of the discovery, and it was not till an accidental visit to a friend's studio that the fact of the panel being a forgery was revealed to him. He taxes the discoverer of the clue with it and the latter commits suicide. The writer of the story is so impressed with the various proofs that Erskine has laid before him that, in spite of that latter's utter scepticism as to the existence of any such person as the dead man evolved from the Sonnets themselves, he completes the researches on his own account. But the moment he has sent off a detailed account of the result of his investigations to Erskine, he himself is filled with an utter disbelief in the accuracy of the conclusions derived from them. Erskine, on the other hand, is once more converted by his letter to his dead friend's theory.