This is what may be called a didactic novel; a kind of composition which we find it very difficult to read. It is, however, replete with shrewd remark, and contains many admirable maxims for the discipline both of the mind and the heart. The question of woman’s rights is very elaborately discussed in the volume, and a strong leaning manifested against the new ideas on that topic. * * * * * _The Practical Model Calculator. By Oliver Byrne, Civil, Military and Mechanical Engineer. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird (successor to E. L. Carey.)_ This is another of the series of very highly useful works with which we have been favored from the press of Mr. Baird, and one that will be of great service to the engineer, mechanic, machinist, naval architect, miner and millwright. It is prepared with great care and accuracy, and will be invaluable to all whose business or studies lead them to inform themselves fully of the subjects upon which it treats. * * * * * =LITERARY GOSSIP.= LIFE OF THACKERAY. Everybody knows Thackeray, and nobody knows any thing about him. We are therefore glad to help ourselves and our readers to a little knowledge of him, derived from a German authority by the _Tribune_. He was born in Calcutta in the year 1811, and is now consequently 41 years old. His father was a high official of the East India Company, which secured him the _entrée_ of the best society, and a large income. Our author was born a “gentleman.” He went to school in England—experienced all the tyranny of a brutal master, and the misery of that system of fagging, a legalized bullying of the little boys by the larger, which is so repulsive to every noble and decent feeling, and which the Englishmen so stoutly defend, as a process which “takes the starch out of pride,” but which is altogether too unreasonable not to lose temper about in discussing. Thackeray has revenged himself upon this inhuman and disgusting system in his Christmas story of “Dr. Birch and his Young Friends,” and he has a general fling at Boarding Schools in the opening of “Vanity Fair,” in which he exhorts the reader to trust the promise of a school prospectus no more than he does the praises of an epitaph. He left school for the University at Cambridge, where he studied with Kinglake, the author of Eothen—Eliot Warburton, who wrote “The Crescent and the Cross,” and was lost with the Amazon, and Richard Moncton Milnes, a well-known London _litterateur_, a poet, and biographer of Keats, and an ornamental liberal member of Parliament.