fill, and, except in the latter portions, its comparative brevity of treatment excludes neither important facts nor modifying views. No shorter work could give the reader any adequate knowledge or conceptions in regard to English history, and no longer work is needed to make him fully acquainted with its essential features. White Wings: A Yachting Romance. By William Black. New York: Harper & Brothers.--Roy and Viola. By Mrs. Forrester. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.--The Wellfields. By Jessie Fothergill. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Holt & Co.--Troublesome Daughters. By L.B. Walford. (Leisure--Hour Series.) New York: Holt & Co.--Brigitta. By Berthold Auerbach. (Leisure--Hour Series.) New York: Holt & Co. There is a time appointed to read novels--a time which belongs, like that of other good things, to youth, when the real and the ideal merge into each other, and even the most practical beliefs turn upon the notion that the world was created for ourselves, and that the general system of things is bound to furnish circumstances and incidents which shall flatter our unsatisfied desires. It seems a pity that it should not fall to the lot of the critic to write down his impression of new books at this epoch, when he is most fitted to enjoy them. When romance and other delights have blankly vanished--"gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were"--he is scarcely fitted to trust the worth of his own impressions. Reading from mere idle curiosity or with critical intentions, and reading with delight, with eager absorption in the story and an eager desire to know how it turns out, are two different matters. The loss of this capacity for enjoyment of the every-day novel is not a subject for self-gratulation, coming as it does from our own absence of imagination and from narrowing instead of increasing powers. That period of our existence when we could read anything which offered should be looked back upon with a feeling of purely admiring regret, and in our efforts to master the novel of to-day we should endeavor to bring back the glory and the sweetness of the early dream.