"All the grim, unyielding pride of race of England's old autocracy is made incarnate in the personality of one aged woman, the ever-dominating title-character in this admirable study of changing social orders. It is a heroic picture that the author paints of this grim old head of the house of Beaminster. She stands out supreme amid the pages, one of the most notable figures put into a book in a long time."--Philadelphia Press.
"Walpole has strengthened his claim to position by proving that he is not a man of one book, for The Duchess of Wrexe is without doubt one of the big novels of the year. It is a novel of extreme significance."--Samuel Abbott in The Boston Post.
THE GOLDEN SCARECROW
"If you love enough we are with you everywhere--forever"--that is the word of the little children that stupid people call "dead." Always here, playing in the room they loved. Such is the end of The Golden Scarecrow, the most original book by the author of Fortitude. It is the story of a dozen children living about a spacious old square, a square filled with leisure and the sound of leaves, in the heart of London. The son of a duke is one, and one the forlornly playing child of a housekeeper who drank and was untidy, but their lives were all bound together by the Friend--who is the Friend of Stevenson's child-verses--who in dangerous or unhappy moments comes to children and with his great warm arm guides them.... There is a wonderful fancifulness in The Golden Scarecrow, a mellow and gentle beauty; and a really remarkable ability to enter into the children's own world, where carpets are vast moors, and the fire whispers secrets, and the lashing out of a whip of wind suggests things vast and secret and perilous. Mr. Walpole has "loved enough"; has so loved children and the little land of the imagination that he has put into this book the quality which can never be quite plumbed--tenderness. And it is not the awkward tenderness of the person not born to write; but graceful and perfect and winning as a Greek vase.
"The fact that childhood is not a mere prelude to adult life but worth while for its own sake has seldom been more beautifully expressed."--Chicago Evening Post.
"Few adults preserve their line of communication with that world of fancy so real to children. But when one of rare fancy visualizes it a chord of kinship is struck; memory rolls back the years, and the heart responds. Barrie did it in The Little White Bird. Hugh Walpole joins him with The Golden Scarecrow."--Boston Herald.
"Only those readers of Mr. Walpole's novels who have missed any real sense of them will be surprised by this singularly attractive series of sketches. There is an infinite pathos and a quite exquisite charm in the first sketch, the one which suggests the spirit of them all.... It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that in these child-studies there is not a whiff of the pseudo-sentiment about childhood which in some writings has reached the nauseating point. Mr. Walpole simply has the very rare gift of actually getting the child's point of view, and we always feel that he really understands what he is talking about."--Providence Journal.
"In one sense it bears kinship to Barrie's Peter Pan and Maeterlink's Blue Bird, for although it is unlike either of these fairy tales in material and treatment, it is related to them in that it recreates for older readers the magical world of the imagination that plays so large a part in the lives of little folk. Mr. Walpole writes with charm and tenderness."--Philadelphia Press.
"It is as beautiful as it is unusual--a wonderfully sympathetic and illuminating study of the mind of the child done with an understanding and sympathy so complete that it is uncanny."--New York Evening Mail.
THE WOODEN HORSE