By SIR SIDNEY COLVIN, M.A., D.Litt.,
FORMERLY SLADE PROFESSOR OF FINE ART IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
AND KEEPER OF THE PRINTS AND DRAWINGS AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
With Portrait. Second Impression. 18s. net.
"Readers of this book will be visited by only one regret—that Sir Sidney Colvin was compelled to abandon his larger plan of writing his personal recollections in several volumes. Such dreams, such memories as these are treasures. Sir Sidney, for all his modesty, does not persuade us that they can be enjoyed so richly without some equivalent virtue. That there are special aptitudes for reaching Corinth is proved by these delightful pages."—Times Literary Supplement.
"The sloven style, the trivial matter, of so many of the Reminiscences which every publishing season pours forth makes all the more welcome by contrast a book of memories that is both rich in interest and itself a piece of literature. Such is Sir Sidney Colvin's 'Memories and Notes.' It is a pleasure to read from beginning to end, if only for the exact and vivid phrasing, the sustained felicity of cadence, at times touching emotion and imagination at once with just that kind of beauty of sound in the words which is proper to fine prose."—Mr. LAURENCE BINYON in the Bookman.
"The man who enormously increased the regard of the public for Landor, who indefatigably forwarded the interests of R. L. Stevenson, and who is unmatched for his scholarly exposition of Keats, would, of course, write a book of literary gossip with distinction and taste. But Sir Sidney Colvin has done more than that. This book is a model of what such books should be; it is well bred, balanced, informing, and yet it is light and readable all through."—Spectator.
"After all the reminiscences by women of no conceivable importance, and all the gossip of chatterboxes in the purlieus of Fleet Street, it is pleasant to meet a narrator who comes under the old-fashioned comfortable rubric of 'a scholar and a gentleman.'
Oh! how comely it is and how reviving
To the spirits of just men long opprest
by fusty anecdotes about third-class politicians to breathe the atmosphere of intellectual good breeding."—Mr. EDMUND GOSSE in The Sunday Times.
"The high vitality of the 'seventies and 'eighties, both in England and France, is made to pulse again. The book is indispensable where it was bound to excel, as in the personal study of Robert Louis Stevenson. But, also, it is singularly close and graphic in ways for which we were not prepared."—Observer.