various contributors

“ There is something so human and simple in Sir Melville's method of narration that it is with an effort that one realises what an important person he really was, and what extraordinary ability he must have had to win and hold his high position. ”

“ An almost too poignant intensity of realism, expressed in a distinguished and fastidious idiom, characterises Mr. Lawrence's method. It is a realism not of minutely recorded outward happenings, trivial or exciting, but of fiercely contested agonies of the spirit. None of these stories is a story in the accepted mode. ”

“ If The Prussian Officer, a study of morbidly vicious cruelty practised by a captain of Cavalry on his helpless orderly (and the first of a sheaf of collected stories, short or shortish, by Mr. D. H. Lawrence, issued by Messrs. Duckworth) , had been written since the declaration of war it would certainly be discounted as a product of the prevailing odium bellicosum. But it appeared well in the piping times of peace, and I remember it (as I remember others of the collection) with a freshness which only attaches to work that lifts itself out of the common ruck. ”