GLOBE.—"This book is full of useful information and sensible comment on a people and country which are very little known in England, even among the cultivated and travelling classes."
ILLUSTRATED TIMES.—"The book may be recommended as embodying a large amount of varied information concerning Russia in the pleasantest possible form. Every page has the advantage of being readable, and is always fresh in what it has to say and in the manner of saying it."
SPECTATOR.—"This is not only one of the most amusing books that we have read for a long time, but also the best and most reliable account of Russian life and manners which has hitherto been given to the public."
SECOND EDITION.
THE HISTORY OF THE OPERA,
From Monteverde to Donizetti.
BY SUTHERLAND EDWARDS, ESQ.
2 vols. post 8vo, 21s.
THE TIMES.—"The new history of the lyrical drama with which Mr. Sutherland Edwards favours the public, has three qualities to recommend it. In the first place, it contains, for its size, a very complete account of the progress of an art, which now, beyond all others, occupies the attention of the civilized world; in the second place, it is one of those treasures of amusing anecdote that may be taken up and laid down at a moment's notice; in the third place, it abounds with the observations of a shrewd and independent thinker, who has seen much, read much, and travelled much, and who approaches his subject less as a professed musician than as one of those cultivated men who take a position between the artist and the multitude, and who, after all, constitute the body upon whom the general appreciation of every art depends.... The anecdotes, which we have given in illustration of an extremely short and inglorious period of operatic history, occupy but very few pages in Mr. Edwards' book; and, when we inform our readers that his two volumes are replete with matter of the same kind, they will easily judge of the amount of entertainment to be derived from his labours. So abundant is his material, that he might, if he had pleased, have filled a dozen quartos; and, as he himself confesses, he found the task of omission heavier than that of collection. Let us add, that he has omitted well, and that he has seasoned a pleasant and instructive history with the very concentrated essence of agreeable gossip."