Altogether we take great joy in recording our conviction that “Great Expectations” is a masterpiece.  We have never sympathized in the mean delight which some critics seem to experience in detecting the signs which subtly indicate the decay of power in creative intellects.  We sympathize still less in the stupid and ungenerous judgments of those who find a still meaner delight in wilfully asserting that the last book of a popular writer is unworthy of the genius which produced his first.  In our opinion, “Great Expectations” is a work which proves that we may expect from Dickens a series of romances far exceeding in power and artistic skill the productions which have already given him such a preeminence among the novelists of the age.

Tom Brown at Oxford:  A Sequel to School-Days at Rugby.  By the Author of “School-Days at Rugby,” “Scouring of the White Horse,” etc.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 2 vols. 16mo.

Thomas Hughes, the author of these volumes, does not, on a superficial examination, seem to deserve the wide reputation he has obtained.  We hunt his books in vain for any of those obvious peculiarities of style, thought, and character which commonly distinguish a man from his fellows.  He does not possess striking wit, or humor, or imagination, or power of expression.  In every quality, good or bad, calculated to create “a sensation,” he is remarkably deficient.  Yet everybody reads him with interest, and experiences for him a feeling of personal affection and esteem.  An unobtrusive, yet evident nobility of character, a sound, large, “round-about” common-sense, a warm sympathy with English and human kind, a practical grasp of human life as it is lived by ordinary people, and an unmistakable sincerity and earnestness of purpose animate everything he writes.  His “School-Days at Rugby” delighted men as well as boys by the freshness, geniality, and truthfulness with which it represented boyish experiences; and the Tom Brown who, in that book, gained so many friends wherever the English tongue is spoken, parts with none of his power to interest and charm in this record of his collegiate life.  Mr. Hughes has the true, wholesome English love of home, the English delight in rude physical sports, the English hatred of hypocrisy and cant, the English fidelity to facts, the English disbelief in all piety and morality which are not grounded in manliness.  The present work is full of illustrations of these healthy qualities of his nature, and they are all intimately connected with an elevated, yet eminently sagacious spirit of Christian philanthropy.  Tom Brown at Oxford, as well as Tom Brown at Rugby, will, so far as he exerts any influence, exert one for good.  He has a plentiful lack of those impossible virtues which disgust boys and young men with the models set up as examples for them to emulate in books deliberately moral and religious; but he none the less shows how a manly and Christian character can be attained by methods which are all the more influential