Page:Under the Sun.djvu/393

Rh reflections which the objects around him suggest. Underlying this indirect way of looking at things, a genuine love of Indian rural life, and a cultivated taste, are abundantly indicated. Some of the brief descriptive passages are curiously vivid.” — Daily News.

“Mr. Robinson is a genial naturalist and genuine humorist. A more agreeable pocket-companion we can hardly choose than this volume.” — Illustrated London News.

“Mr. Robinson’s charming essays breathe the true literary spirit in every line. They are not mere machine-made sweetmeats, to be swallowed whole and never again remembered; but they rather resemble the most cunning admixtures of good things, turned out by a skilful craftsman in matters culinary. Whoever once reads this delicious little book will not lay it carelessly aside, but will place it with respectful epicurean tenderness on his favorite shelf, side by side with Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘Kindred Musings,’ and not far removed from the fresh country atmosphere of Gilbert White’s ‘Selborne.’ Mr. Robinson plants himself in the verandah of a bungalow, it is true, and surveys nature as it presents itself upon the sweltering banks of the Jumna; but he sees it with an eye trained on the shores of Cam or Isis, and describes it with a hand evidently skilled in the composition of classical lore. Mr. Robinson’s humor is too tender not to have a pathetic side; little children come in for no small share of pitiful, kindly notice and the love for dumb creatures shines out in every page.” — London.

“Mr. Edwin Arnold’s praise is valuable, for it is the praise of one who knows; and Mr. Robinson fully deserves all that is said of him. His style is delightful. He has read much and observed much; and there is a racy flavor of Charles Lamb about him. A book which once begun is sure to be read through, and then read aloud to any to whom the reader wishes to give pleasure.” — The Echo.

“Bright and fanciful — the author has done for the common objects of India something which Gilbert White did for Selborne—graceful and animated sketches, sometimes full of an intense reality, in other places of a quaint and delicate humor which has a flavor as of the ‘Essays of Elia.’” — The Guardian.

“This dainty volume is one of those rare books that come upon the critic from time to time as a surprise and a refreshment, — a book to be put in the favorite corner of the library, and to be taken up often again with renewed pleasure. Mr. Robinson’s brief picturesque vignettes of every-day life in India — always goodnatured, often humorous — are real little idylls of exquisite taste and delicacy. Mr. Robinson’s style is exuberant with life, overflowing too with reminiscences of Western literature, even the most modern. In his longer and more ambitious descriptions he displays rare graphic power; and his sketches of the three seasons — especially those of the rainy and hot seasons — remind one forcibly of the wonderful realism of Kalidasa himself.” — Dublin Review.

“The author is one of the quaintest and most charming of our modern writers in an almost forgotten kind. Mr. Robinson belongs to that school of pure literary essayists whose types are to be found in Lamb and Christopher North and Oliver Wendell Holmes, but who seem to have died out for the most part with the prescientific age. One or two of the pieces remind one not a little of Poe in his mood of pure terror with a tinge of mystery; the story of the ‘Man-Eating Tree,’ for example, is told with all Poe’s minute realism. It is good sterling light literature of a sort that we do not often get in England.” — Pall Mall Gazette.

“‘The Hunting of the Soko’ is a traveller’s tale of a very exciting kind; and the first of all, ‘The Man-Eating Tree,’ is quite a master- piece of that kind. But the best and also the longest contribution to the volume is the sketch of an Indian tour called ‘Sight-Seeing.’ His pictures of India are certainly very vivid.” — St. James’s Gazette.

“Tenderness and pathos; delicate and humorously quaint.” — Pan.

“In ‘The Hunting of the Soko’ there is much cleverness in the way in which the human attributes of the quarry are insinuated and worked out, clouding the successful chase with a taint of manslaughter and uncomfortable remorse. The account of the ‘Man-Eating Tree,’ too, a giant development of our droseras and