+ Cleveland p72 Ag ’20 30w
“Mr Smith has let his ear preside at every choosing, so that his volume is as rigorously cadenced as a collection of sonnets would be. Here with some omissions is the most perfect music which English prose has made.”
+ Nation 111:278 S 4 ’20 100w
“What Mr Pearsall Smith holds to be good prose is to us only a kind of good prose; the kind that is alembicated and, as we say, poetical. It is the prose of conceit, imagery, and eloquence which stands over against the prose of narration, argument, or satire. So that it would strike even one who had no critical opinion of English prose and very little reading in it as somewhat strange that there is not one single piece of narrative in all this book.”
+ − Nation [London] 26:398 D 13 ’19 2500w
“The contents are charmingly arranged and delightfully savory and brief.”
+ New Repub 22:161 Mr 31 ’20 100w
“His treasury is a book of beauty, a book to keep at one’s bed’s head, a book to dip into, to travel with, to reread.” P. L.
+ New Repub 22:253 Ap 21 ’20 1500w
“The anthology as it stands is now anything but representative.... The selections from the Bible are entirely admirable. The passages from Jeremy Taylor and Dr Donne are excellently chosen, and Mr Pearsall Smith is to be congratulated upon his phrase from Traherne and upon having recollected that Chaucer was not only the first English poet. Indeed, much of the prose written by poets in this book will delight and surprise most of Mr Pearsall Smith’s readers.”