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 itself;--but the
second was _made_, and the kind fairy that stood godmother to its elder
brother had been sent for and accordingly would not come.
In this first number of his new story Mr. Hughes seems to have found his
good genius again, or his good genius to have found him.
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