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, the subject of the memoir before us, was the eldest son of a Berkshire squire, and little more than a year older than his brother and biographer. Very pleasant is the glimpse of child life in an English county forty years ago that is given in the story of his first years. From the first he showed the calm fearlessness, the practicality and the helpfulness which seem to have been among his most prominent characteristics. These qualities, and with them a rigorous conscientiousness, a sensitive unselfishness, and--no trifling advantage in these or any other days--a splendid _physique_, he took with him, and preserved alike unaltered, through Rugby, Oxford and after years. Little wonder that the possessor of such gifts became a Sixth-form boy and football captain at his public school, and achieved boating and cricketing successes, an honorable degree, and the repute of being the most popular man of his day at the university. Most people who take an interest in boat-racing, and many who do not, have heard of that famous race upon the Thames at Henley, in which a crew of _seven_ Oxford oarsmen snatched victory from a (not _the_) Cambridge "eight;" but not everybody knows--for the feat was done now thirty years ago, and names are lost while the memory of a fact survives--that George Hughes pulled the stroke-oar of that plucky seven-oared boat.