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One rarely meets with three so thoroughly charming and satisfactory books for children as the "Doll-World Series," by Mrs. Robert O'Reilly. Their author seems to possess—and in a high degree—every one of the very peculiar and varied characteristics which fit one to be a good writer for the young. She is humorous,—one ought perhaps to say funny, for that is the word which the children understand best ; and Mrs. O'Reilly's wit is not the sly satire which appeals in a kind of aside to the adults present, but the bubbling merriment which is addressed directly to the ready risibles of her proper audience. She is pathetic also, with the keen, transitory pathos which belongs to childhood, a pathos never too much elaborated or too distressingly prolonged. She is abundantly dramatic. Her stories are full of action. Her incidents, though never forced or unnatural, are almost all picturesque, and they succeed one another rapidly.

Nevertheless we have not yet noted Mrs. O'Reilly's chief excellence as a story-writer, nor is it easy to find a single word to express that admirable quality. We come nearest it, perhaps, when we say that her tales have absolute reality; there is in them no suggestion of being made up, no visible composition. The illusion of her pictures is so perfect that it is not illusion. This note of reality, which ought to be prevalent in any romance, is positively indispensable in a juvenile one, and it is perfectly delivered by one only of our native writers of children's books. That one is of course Miss Alcott. Her "Little Women" are as real as Daisy Grey and Bessie Somers; the "Little Men" very nearly so. We have other writers who approach Miss Alcott, more or less closely: Mrs. Walker, Aunt Fanny, Susan Coolidge in the more realistic parts of the "New Year's Bargain;" and indeed the latter writer comes so near truth, and *s also so like the author of the "Doll World" stories in the quality of her talent, that one hopes her next essay may be absolutely successful in this regard.

The pretty edition of Mrs. Robert O'Reilly's works, just issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, will be welcome to a throng of juvenile readers as the first gift-book of the autumn. It is hard to say which of the three charming volumes comprised in this series will be most liked at the nursery hearth. We fancy "Doll World " appeals most tenderly to the affections of little matrons with baby-uses and families of wood and wax to care for; though "Deborah's Drawer," with its graceful interlinking of story with story, is sure to be the elected favorite of many. Our own preference is for "Daisy's Companions," and this for a reason less comprehensible to children than to older people; namely, that the story closes, leaving the characters in the midst of their childish lives, and without hint of further fate or development.

There are few books for children which we can recommend so thoroughly and so heartily as hers. And as one of our wise men has told us that "there is a want of principle in making amusements for children dear," Messrs. Roberts Brothers deserve thanks for giving us these volumes in a form at once so tasteful and so inexpensive.

ROBERTS BROTHERS,