The Spectator says: “Many people who are not students will find this survey of a wide field both interesting and useful, for few writers since Hallam’s day have attempted to envisage the literary activity of medieval and modern Europe as a whole.”
The Morning Post says: “Hitherto no guide-book of the kind has existed in the English language.... The author of this ample and learned book, which shows an amazing depth and range of reading, writes with power and precision, and has provided an invaluable literary map, so to speak, of that which is a terra incognita to most English students of literature.”
The Times Literary Supplement says: “The mass of knowledge of which he disposes, if nowhere amounting to specialism, is in the aggregate extraordinarily copious and varied; and he handles it with an agility of mind, an openness to impressions, and a deftness in seizing salient points, which make his book constantly fresh and informing.”
The Journal of Education says: ... “The other and nobler way, of which Goldsmith (with all his shortcomings) and Hallam set the example, and which Mr. Laurie Magnus has followed, gives us something different from a ‘cram’ book or a book of reference. The student is led by his guide to the summit of hills that command a great stretch of plain: he views the country spread out as a map before him, and places that he has passed through or will visit in days to come are seen in their right relations to each other. To attempt this kind of conspectus is incomparably the more difficult task, and success in it seems to require the wide knowledge and power of generalization of a Lord Acton. Mr. Laurie Magnus would doubtless disclaim the ambition to ‘rival the cultivated mind of Europe incarnate in its finest characteristics,’ but he has performed a very arduous feat with a skill that, to one reader at least, has pleasantly recalled Viscount Bryce’s memorable description of Acton’s conversation.”
C.H.H., whose initials reveal a distinguished authority on the subject, writes in the Manchester Guardian: “Mr. Magnus has conceived his task on large lines.... Continental culture through the centuries has moved to vast and complex rhythms of its own, only fitfully and in fragments caught up into our island music, and it is the merit of Mr. Magnus’s sketch to have made these larger rhythms in outline clear.... The sketch of the age of Dante in the second chapter is an admirable synthesis.... The Renaissance is unfolded in a series of vivid delineations and portraitures, lightly but significantly touched. Some of them, such as Petrarch, Montaigne, Cervantes, could not well be bettered within their compass, ... and there is no lack of acute and curious observation by the way, in which even the well-read may find it worth their while to glean.... The wealth of knowledge, though never that of a specialist, is very remarkable.”
Prof. George Saintsbury writes in the Observer: “This book of Mr. Magnus’s is, for its subject, just the sort of book upon which to set training college students, while it ought to do not a little good to the superior shepherds—perhaps to some of the chief pastors themselves.... Here you get a view of the whole body to be compared with a view of the other whole.... A very difficult thing to construct; a thing almost impossible to construct without some gaps or weak points here and there; but a thing very well worth attempting, and, in this example, a thing very fairly and usefully done.”