a generation of painters,
has twelve lines! And we can hardly be accused of hypercriticism, in
directing the attention of the editors to a sentence like the following,
in the article _Diptera_, p. 498, 2d col.:--"Though _this order_
contains the bloodthirsty mosquito, the disgusting flesh-fly, and many
insects depositing their eggs in the bodies of living animals, _it_ is a
most useful one, supplying food to insectivorous birds, and _themselves_
[who? what?] consuming decomposing animal and vegetable substances,"
etc. But these are instances of oversight in not very important matters,
or of inaccuracy of expression, or of difference of judgment between
the editors and ourselves as to plan, which even in our judgment do not
affect the value of the work in which they occur. Graver errors could be
found in almost every work of great scope that ever came from the
press. We indicate them that we may afford some help toward a nearer
approximation to that perfection which is unattainable.

_Tom Brown at Oxford: a Sequel to School-Days at Rugby._ By THOMAS
HUGHES, etc. Part I. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1859.

Many men write successful books; but very few have the power of making
a book succeed by naturalness, simplicity, and quiet strength, as Mr.
Hughes found the secret of doing in his "School-Days at Rugby." It is so
easy to be eloquent,--scarce a modern French novelist but has the gift
of it by the ream; so easy to be philosophical,--one has only to begin
a few substantives with capitals; and withal it is so hard to be genial
and agreeable. Since Goldsmith's day, perhaps only Irving and Thackeray
had achieved it, till Mr. Hughes made himself the third. It is no
easy thing to write a book that shall seem so easy,--to describe your
school-days with such instinctive rejection of the unessential, that
whoever has been a boy feels as if he were reading the history of his
own, and that your volume shall be no more exotic in America than in
England. Yet this Mr. Hughes accomplished; and it was in a great measure
due to the fact, that beneath the charm of style the reader felt a real
basis of manliness and sincerity.

His second book, "The Scouring of the White Horse," was less
successful,--in part from the narrower range of its interest, and
still more, perhaps, because it lacked the spontaneousness of the
"School-Days." In his first book there was no suggestion of authorship;
it seemed an inadvertence, something which came of