6–41708.
One feels that Mr. Bennett fairly slaps his canvas with a Kipling brush of comet’s hair. The result is a fantastic, panoramic “improvisation.” “Hugo is proprietor of an immense shop in London. He falls in love with a milliner in one of his innumerable ‘departments.’ She weds another, is pursued by a third, officially dies, is bereft timely of her spouse, and returns in due season to life and Hugo.” (Nation.)
“He never makes an attempt to modify or explain: he piles improbability upon improbability with calm assurance, and mortars it all together with clever little facts and truths in a style which is always restrained and neat, and by its very lack of ornaments convincing.”
| + | Acad. 70: 92. Ja. 27, ’06. 360w. |
“The plot has been deliberately and cunningly designed to sustain the reader’s excitement from chapter to chapter, and, this being admitted as the author’s aim, the book may fairly be pronounced a success.”
| + | Ath. 1906, 1: 131. F. 3. 210w. |
“It is all very absurd and pleasant; all the more so that the writer appears to be regarding his own fable with merely good-humored toleration.”
| + − | Nation. 84: 61. Ja. 17, ’07. 160w. |
“An Italian novel with the plot laid in the sixteenth century is tame in comparison, and though Mr. Bennett has used all kinds of incongruously modern stage machinery along with his melodramatic characters, he does it with a seriousness that seems to bridge the difficulty.”