(9–24668)
“The Clarendon press has published, after a long interval, the third volume of Messrs Fletcher and Walker’s collection of historical portraits. It contains a hundred and fourteen portraits, selected by Mr Walker, of men and women of eighteenth-century Britain, with short and racy memoirs by Mr Fletcher. The portrait gallery includes the famous admirals; generals like Wolfe, Cumberland, Wade, and Ligonier; Wesley, Berkeley, and other great divines; men of letters, lawyers, men of science like Newton and Halley, Dodsley the publisher, Arkwright, Wedgwood, and Brindley, the maker of canals, whose talents would have rusted in obscurity had he not been employed by the Duke of Bridgewater.” (Spec) The previous volumes appeared in 1909 and 1912.
“It is fair to say that the collaborators of this volume are to be congratulated in general on their selection. Yet the principle on which they worked remains a mystery. One needs only to consider the biographies which have accompanied the portraits of other such collections to perceive that Mr Fletcher is as much a genius in his way as Mr Walker is in his; and that between them they have produced an extraordinarily entertaining and instructive book.” W. C. Abbott
+ − Am Hist R 25:489 Ap ’20 600w + Ath p640 Jl 18 ’19 90w
“Mr Fletcher’s potted ‘lives’ are excellent: they are a pattern of what such brief biographies should be. Scholarly, of course, informative and readable, they are completely at ease in their handling of men in every walk of life. The book has its limitations.” M. H. Spielmann
+ − Ath p746 Ag 15 ’19 1800w Brooklyn 12:40 N ’19 30w
“The value of this publication is so great for educational purposes that one hesitates before offering any criticism. Mr Fletcher’s biographical notices are in their turn models of conciseness and economy of space, and give just the information which should excite the student to a better acquaintance with each subject in turn. These notices, however, convey some idea that they have been written entirely apart from the portraits themselves.” Lionel Cust
+ − Eng Hist R 34:607 O ’19 670w
“We have seen better photographic reproductions. But the volume is none the less of the greatest interest and value.”