s,
and others--for its re-issue as a book.

Of the story itself little need be said. It deals in a bright and
vigorous style with the kaleidoscopic, throbbing life of a great public
school--that world in miniature which, in its daily opportunities and
temptations, ambitions and failures, has so often afforded superabundant
material for narratives powerful to enchain the attention and sway the
emotions, whether to smiles or tears. This will take its place, amongst
the best of them.

Though the story is one of school life, its interest is by no means
limited to school or college walls. Boys of all sorts and conditions--
ay, and their parents too--will follow its fortunes with unflagging zest
from the first page to the last; and it is difficult to conceive of any
reader, be he young or old, who would not be the better for its vivid
portraiture and bracing atmosphere. There is a breeziness about it
calculated to stir the better life in the most sluggish; and without
pretence or affectation it rings out its warnings, no less than its
notes of cheer, clear and rousing as trumpet blasts.

"Do right, and thou hast nought to fear,
Right hath a power that makes thee strong;
The night is dark, but light is near,
The grief is short, the joy is long."

Without the most distant approach to that fatal kind of sermonising
which all but inevitably repels those whom it is meant to benefit, the
story forcefully illustrates how rapidly they may sink who once tamper,
for seeming present advantage, with truth, and how surely, sooner or
later, a noble character comes to vindication and honour; and in all
such respects it is eminently true to life. These boys of Saint
Dominic's, even the best of them, are very human--neither angels nor
monstrosities, but, for the most part, ardent, impulsive, out-and-out,
work-a-day lads; with the faults and failings of inexperience and
impetuosity, no doubt, but also with that moral grit and downright
honesty of purpose that are still, we believe, the distinguishing mark
of the true British public-school boy. Hence one is impelled to take
from the outset a most genuine interest in them and their affairs, and
to feel quite as though one had known many of them personally for years,
and been distinctly the better, too, for that knowledge. Such boys
stand at the antipodes alike of the unreal abstractions of an effeminate
sentimentalism--the paragons who prate platitudes and die young--and of