“He has chosen for the subjects of his full-length portraits, not artists nor men of original genius, but three men, and one woman, of action—Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold, and General Gordon. But with these full-length portraits he gives smaller sketches of many of their contemporaries—of Gladstone. Sidney Herbert, Lord Hartington, Lord Acton and Lord Cromer; of Keble and Clough and Newman and Cardinal Wiseman.”
“The whole forms an interesting picture and a pungent criticism of the Victorian age.”
“It is human nature he is interested in, and he pierces through the most solemn misrepresentations to the core, to the divinity, of his subject. He discloses weaknesses not because he is prying but because he is disclosing. They are relevant weaknesses, without which the story would not ?t.”
– The Book Review Digest