Max Beerbohm

“ But nowadays it cannot appear that one of our lady-novelists in Early-Victorian days wrote to her old schoolmaster, asking him to write to her, without the whole of Fleet Street rising as one man to admit that she has ennobled her sex, purified our public life, and made wider for all time the scope of human emotion. ”

“ On the other hand, his burning faith in a personal devil, his frank delight in earthquakes and pestilences, and his belief that every one but himself will be brought back to life in time to be frozen to death in the next glacial epoch, seem rather to stamp him as an optimist. ”

“ OF Kolniyatsch, as of all authentic master-spirits in literature, it is true that He must be judged rather by what he wrote than by what he was. But the quality of his genius, albeit nothing if not national and also universal, is at the same time so deeply personal that we cannot afford to close our eyes on his life—a life happily not void of those sensational details which are what we all really care about. "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now." Kolniyatsch was born, last of a long line of rag-pickers, in 1886. ”

“ Pegaway would be the first to admit that their renderings of the prose and verse they love so well are a wretched substitute for the real thing. I wanted to get the job myself, but they nipped in and got it before me. Thank heaven, they cannot deprive me of the power to read Kolniyatsch in the original Gibrisch and to crow over you who can't. ”