Selection from Notices by the Press.
(The Westminster Review.)
‘A most elegant volume. Artist, printer, and author have vied with each other in its production. All the well-known spots are taken from their most favourable points of view, and engraved with a skill for which Mr. Linton’s name is a sufficient guarantee. Mr. Wise is peculiarly fitted for his task. He revels in painting the beauties of his native county with an enthusiastic admiration, in which he makes Shakspere share, by the readiness with which he localises descriptions in the poet’s works that would have no such home-like effect on an ordinary reader. He does this, too, without any arbitrary forcing, and gives a new grace to the character of the universally beloved poet by connecting him by hitherto unobserved ties with the home of his youth.’
(The Spectator.)
‘A critical biography of the one supreme poet of humanity; written with skill, discrimination, and taste.... Mr. Wise notices in a reverent spirit, and in soberly elegant language, the intellectual talents, the imperial diction and gorgeous colouring, the knowledge, the wisdom, imagination, and many-sidedness of this wonderful artist; but he lays even more stress on Shakspere’s moral characteristics, and on the effectual qualities of his nature, than on these more brilliant and obvious endowments; on his genial humour, his universal sympathy and tolerance, his serene hilarity, his robust simple-hearted patriotism, and his love of freedom—freedom of speculation, freedom of discussion. The essential goodness of our great poet is the main argument of Mr. Wise’s discourse.’
(The Daily News.)
‘We find the book as good as it is pretty, and therefore twice worthy commendation. We have to thank Mr. Wise for a glossary which not only explains the provincialisms of Shakspere, but, è converso, gives a Shaksperian colour to phrases in use among the Warwickshire peasantry to this day. So delightfully readable a glossary as this we have seldom encountered.’
(The Morning Herald.)
‘Mr. Wise has treated an old and well-worn subject with singular good sense and taste.... The chapter on Shakspere himself is a sound and masterly examination of the nature and spirit of his genius, as revealed in his works. Mr. Wise has a voice of his own in the matter, and it is well worth listening to.’
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