St. James’s Gazette.—“It would seem as if the author of A Dead Man’s Diary and A Book of Strange Sins had found for the weird moods and impulses, the sighs and sobs from a hidden world, which he has before controlled in the realm of fiction, a local habitation and a name in the personalities of the actual mortals he delineates in these luminous sketches.”
Mr. Eden Phillpotts.—“These scholarly papers. His essay on Heine shows a wonderfully accurate estimate of that fantastic genius, while his Rossetti shows critical insight of a high order.”
Pall Mall Gazette.—“If one of the wholesome offices of tragic literature be to purify the soul by terror, Mr. Kernahan has done something towards the purification of the world.”
Daily Mail.—“Crowded with pictures of great imaginative beauty.... There can be no doubt that this little book must make a very deep and abiding impression upon the hearts and minds of all who read it.”
Mr. T. P. O’Connor.—“I do not remember to have read for a long time a study of the deadliness to soul and body—of what I may even call the murderousness of purely sensual passion—in which the moral is so finely, and I must use the word, awfully conveyed.”
Evening News.—“The revelations are those of a man of genius. Callous or brainless must the man or woman be who can rise from its perusal without tumultuous and chastening thought.”
The Daily Chronicle.—“A writer possessing not only a fine literary gift, and a marvellous power of intense emotional realisation, but a fresh, strange, and fascinating imaginative outlook. We know of nothing published in recent years which, in lurid impressiveness and relentless veracity of rendering, is to be compared with this.”
The Sketch.—“The daring freshness of his thought, his great ability in expressing it, his contempt for common tradition, the sincerity which exudes from every page of his work, captivate the reader. I do not know any piece of prose which opens up so many great questions in so few lines.”
The Star.—“Palpitating with life. Terrible in their intensity and vivid vivisection of human mind and character. In dealing with such subjects as these, any one but Mr. Kernahan would be morbid, perhaps revolting. Mr. Kernahan writes of them with a power which is often genius. The work of a man who, seeing beneath the crust of life, had the courage and the power to write what he saw.”
Mr. Barry Pain.—“We find beautiful and appreciative writing in these pages.”