Read it through once

While Dr. Mitford was in town—he went up in the early part of 1835—he opened up negotiations on the subject with Richard Bentley, the publisher, and secured very good terms, with the result that Bentley published _Belford Regis: or Sketches of a Country Town_, late in the same year. Charming and valuable as the book may be for its picture of life in the Reading of that day, it cannot compare in the slightest degree with the similar work which preceded it. It is slipshod as to style and is full of repetitions, bearing all too plainly the marks of hurried compilation and the harassed, overworked mind of its author. Miss Mitford, recognized these faults, but attributed them to another cause, viz., “its having been sent up at different times; having been first intended to appear in one volume, then in two, and now in three volumes.”