(Eng ed 20–14702)
“A kinship of spirit as well as relationship by marriage bound Mr Birrell and Locker-Lampson, and in every page of his character sketch, he reveals a sympathy that is both personal and professional. Few books are both more and less a biography than this. It is merely a series of impressions and appreciations. Less than half its opening pages contain the biographical matter, and then follow some fifty pages of letters from eminent literary men—including Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson, Holmes, Ruskin, Hardy and Stevenson—which reveal the esteem in which Locker-Lampson was held by his contemporaries. The other material which completes the volume includes six letters written by him to his son at Eton, some family bookplates, bibliographical notes on the books in the famous Rowfant library, and a brief account of the Rowfant library at Cleveland, with a list of its publications.”—Boston Transcript
“Mr Birrell’s biography reads so queerly because it brings before us a real human being. It is not that he is more profound than others, or that he has a story to tell to which we cannot fail to listen. It is that the values of life are quite different from those of biography. There is such a thing as living. One of the chief merits of Mr Birrell’s method, which is a peculiar compound of wit and sanity, is that it reduces these nineteenth-century phantoms to human scale.” V. W.
+ Ath p201 Ag 13 ’20 1300w
“It has been a long time since ‘London lyrics’ first appeared, but none the less this intimate and accurate character sketch of their author has a genuine interest and value.” H: L. West
+ Bookm 52:73 S ’20 450w
“A gentle and a genial tribute, it may well be said, is this volume to the personality, the achievements and the memory of a rare being.” E. F. E.
+ Boston Transcript p6 Je 30 ’20 1250w
“As a piece of book-making, the offering is admirable; as a book—! But Mr Birrell is a devoted chronicler and if, from these impeccable pages, his placid father-in-law emerges an even less interesting figure than he seemed before one’s perusal of his memorial, the meticulous chronicler himself can not escape scot-free.” L: Untermeyer