"Mr. Hare has an easy, agreeable style, and tells a story with humour and skill."—The Saturday Review.
"It would be well for all who think the children of to-day are over-pampered and too much considered, to read Mr. Hare's life."—Lady's Pictorial.
"Very delicate, idyllic, and fascinating are the pictures the author has drawn of daily life in old rectories and country houses."—The World.
"Mr. Hare has the gift, the rare gift, of writing about himself truthfully. Nor can a quick eye for shades of character be denied to Mr. Hare, who does not seem ready to take people at their own estimate or even at what may be called their market price. But we do not detect a touch of malice, but only that knack of telling the truth which is so hateful to the ordinary biographer, and so distasteful to that sentimental public which is never so happy as when devouring sugared falsehoods."—The Speaker.
"The book has throughout a strong human interest. It contains a great many anecdotes, and in our opinion, at all events, deserves to take rank among notable biographical works."—Westminster Gazette.
"A deeply interesting book. It is the story of a man who has seen much and suffered much, and who out of the fulness of his experience can bring forth much to interest and entertain.... The book has a wealth of apt quotations and graceful reference, and though written in a scholarly and cultured way, it is always simple and interesting.... Nothing in the work has been set down in malice; there are excuses for everybody.... Of course it is hardly necessary to say that the book teems with entertainment from beginning to end."—St. James's Budget.
"There is much besides human character and incident in these well-packed and well-illustrated volumes.... No one will close the work without a feeling not only of gratitude for a long gallery of interesting and brilliantly-speaking portraits, but of sympathy with the biographer."—The Athenæum.
"It is doubtful whether any Englishman living has had a wider acquaintance among people worth knowing in England and on the Continent, than the author of these memoirs. It is also doubtful whether any man, with equal opportunities, could have turned them to so good an account.... We have here an incomparable storehouse of anecdotes concerning conspicuous persons of the first half of this Victorian age."—New York Sun.
"This is assuredly a book to read."—Freeman.