nformation is often more effective when
indirectly conveyed. Clearly, then, if you convey your information too
directly, you lose all this advantage.

Perfection is as intolerable in these as in any other stories. We all
want, especially children, some amiable weaknesses to sympathize with.
Thus, in "Ernest Bracebridge," an English story of school-life, the hero
is a dreadfully unpleasant boy who is always successful and always
right, and we are soon heartily weary of him. Besides, he is a horrible
boy for mastery of all the arts and sciences, and delivers brief and
epigrammatic discourses, being about twelve years old. However, the book
is full of adventure and out-door games, and so far is good.

After all, a child does not need many books. If, however, we are to have
them, we may as well have good ones. There is no reason why dulness
should be diverted from its legitimate channels into the writing of
children's books. Let us disabuse ourselves of the idea that these are
the easiest books to write. Let us remember that the alphabet is harder
to teach than the Greek Drama, and no longer think that the proper man
to write children's books is the man who is able to write nothing else.

_The Simplicity of Christ's Teachings, set forth in Sermons._ By CHARLES
T. BROOKS, Pastor of the Unitarian Church, Newport, R. I. Boston:
Crosby, Nichols, & Co. 1859. 16mo. pp. 342.

The name of the author of this volume has long been known as that of an
accomplished man of letters. Successive volumes of poetic versions,
chiefly from the German, had, by their various merit, gained for him a
high rank among our translators, when four years ago, in 1856, by a
translation of "Faust," he set himself at the head of living authors in
this department of literature. It is little to say of his work, that it
is the best of the numerous English renderings of Goethe's tragedy. It
is not extravagant to assert that a better translation is scarcely
possible. It is a work which combines extraordinary fidelity to the form
of the original with true appreciation of its spirit. It is at once
literal and free, and displays in its execution the qualities both of
exact scholarship and of poetic feeling and capacity.

This work, and the others of a similar kind which preceded it, were the
result of the intervals of leisure occurring in the course of their
author's professional life as a clergyman. While the wider world has
known him only through these volu