Here is a book that was never meant to be dissected and analyzed by
critics and reviewers. It is not hard to imagine the "discomfort and
annoyance" which the writer has (he tells us) felt in consenting to
give to the public a memoir compiled for a private family circle. Still,
on the whole, it is altogether well, and there is good reason to call
attention to it, for there is much benefit in the book for many readers.
It is the loving record of a life that, from first to last, never
challenged the world's attention--that was connected with no great
movement or event, political, theological or social; but a life, all the
same, that was lived with a truth, an earnestness and a straightness
that won the affection and respect of all who came within its influence,
and will, or we are much mistaken, glow warmly in the hearts and
memories of just all whose eyes now light upon this story of it.

How many boys--ay, and grown men and women too--got up from _Tom Brown's
School-days_ consciously the better from the reading of it! But there
was withal a vague feeling of incompleteness, an unsatisfied longing.
The story left off too soon. One wanted to know more of Tom after his
school-days. And then, it was, after all, a novel, a fiction. One would
have liked to come across that Tom, and perhaps felt half afraid that he
might not readily be found outside the cover of the volume. It is true
that that longing to know something of the hero's after-life which is
one accompaniment of the perusal of a thoroughly good work of fiction
was, in the case of Tom Brown, partially gratified. Everybody had the
chance of seeing _Tom Brown at Oxford_, and watching their old
favorite's course through undergraduate days to that haven and final
goal of fiction-writers, marriage. But there he is lost to view for good
and all, and one is left to the amiable hypothesis that he lived happy
all his days, without being either shown how he managed to do so, or
taught how we might manage to do likewise.

Now this _Memoir of a Brother_ may be said just to supply the want that
we have here endeavored to indicate. It is the whole life--the child
life, the school-boy life, the college life and the adult, responsible
life in the world and as a family head--of a real flesh-and-blood,
actualized Tom Brown; and it stands out depicted with an intense
naturalness of coloring that charms one more than the laborious effects
of imaginative biography.

George Hughes, th