The King asks, "Are not the rich and the poor brothers?"
"Ay," answered the man in the crowd, "and the name of the rich brother is Cain." So the young King comes to the Cathedral for his coronation clad in his leathern tunic and the rough sheepskin cloak of other days, and when the wise and worldly Bishop has told him in decorous words even the same as his own courtiers said.
"Sayest thou that in this House?" said the young King, and he strode past the Bishop, and climbed up the steps of the altar, and stood before the Image of the Christ.
But I must not be tempted to continue the quotation of this lovely story, and will only give its closing words—
"And the young King came down from the high altar, and passed home through the midst of the people. But no man dared look upon his face, for it was like the face of an angel."
Here once more is the music of the lectern which an Oxford man of years ago cannot forget, and I wonder if this story of the young King was not written some time before those others which complete the book.
"The Birthday of the Infanta" does not give me the same delight. It is, of course, clever, as all was that Oscar Wilde ever touched, but it is cruel whilst it accuses cruelty. And now and then we have a sentence or a phrase which seems to have escaped revision. The story of the little dwarf who made sport for the princess and whose heart was broken when he found that she was pleased, not by his dances, but by his deformity, is not like its predecessor in the volume, and the picture of "the little dwarf lying on the ground and beating the floor with his clenched hands" did not need the awkward addition "in the most fantastic and exaggerated manner." But every poet, of course, aliquando dormitat, and I would rather appreciate than criticise.
Two more stories complete this beautiful book and I think I have not said yet how beautiful the type and binding and engravings are of this edition of 1891 in which I am reading. If ever it is reprinted it should have still the same sumptuous setting forth.
Wilde himself described the format of the book in the following passage:—"Mr Shannon is the drawer of the dreams, and Mr Ricketts is the subtle and fantastic decorator. Indeed, it is to Mr Ricketts that the entire decorative design of the book is due, from the selection of the type and the placing of the ornamentation, to the completely beautiful cover that encloses the whole.
"The artistic beauty of the cover resides in the delicate tracing, arabesques, and massing of many coral-red lines on a ground of white ivory, the colour effect culminating in certain high gilt notes, and being made still pleasurable by the overlapping band of moss-green cloth that holds the book together."