Keble Howard seems incapable of any sense of tragedy ;
he is able even now to look on at the world with an optimism so cheery that we cannot but envy him, and sketches in his portraits with a laugh at his own, irresponsible efforts at characterization. These pleasant touches of humour are all very well when there is nothing more serious in question than Andrew's Oxford life and his failure to take his degree ; but there is a Want' of sequence in the book, and lack of connexion between the many events and emotions ; and Mr. Howard's jocularity, is apt to become tedious, for when a young man. comes down from Oxford to a penurious life of journalism in London, and is gaining his first impressions of the great city, he wins a knowledge 'of the depths in life which Mr. Howard ignores. So the most , satisfactory chapters of the book are those concerned with the preparatory school in the North of England, where Andrew's difficulties with the small boys are happily chosen. The writer's love of caricature is, however, a danger to all his work. It does not follow, because Dickens could successfully create comic schoolmasters and dingy hypocrites, that Mr. Keble Howard is altogether wise to follow in his tracks.
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