“The dénoûement is ingeniously contrived, with a good curtain, and throughout there is no lack of animated and appropriate, if undistinguished, dialogue. Yet the book leaves us with far less sympathy for the representatives of either régime than Mr Galsworthy’s more serious studies of patricians and rebels.”
+ − Spec 125:118 Jl 24 ’20 420w
“Mr Vachell invariably writes in an optimistic vein and with due sense of the humorous and romantic possibilities of a situation. But the serious under-current is always visible beneath the sun-tipped waves of the author’s light mood.”
+ Springf’d Republican p9a Jl 4 ’20 800w
“It is the sudden confrontations, the changes of fortune and the impact of fate against fate that go to make the book, and they make it in spite of Mr Vachell’s deficient insight into character. The dialogue is clever, amusing, enterprising; but it does not seem to be just exactly what the given person must have said on the given occasion. Mr Vachell supplies a good plot, and the plot is nine-tenths of the novel.”
+ − The Times [London] Lit Sup p200 Mr 25 ’20 350w
VALLANCE, AYMER.[[2]] Old crosses and lychgates. il *$7.50 Scribner 718
(Eng ed 20–18244)
“Mr Vallance sees in the erection of crosses a suitable way to memorialize England’s dead in the great war. ‘It is hoped,’ he says, ‘that it might prove useful to gather together a collection of examples of old crosses and lychgates, as affording the most appropriate form of monuments for reproduction or adaptation to the needs of the present.’ In his historical and descriptive studies of the crosses to be found in England and Wales, except for some unclassified varieties, Mr Vallance classifies them under five types to which he devotes a chapter each. They are the monolith crosses, the shaft-on-steps type, the spire-shaped or Eleanor crosses, preaching and market crosses.”—Boston Transcript