“All the gutter-elements of _Dodo_ are rehashed and warmed up again with no touch of novelty or improvement or chastisement.... The Lives of the Bad are interesting assuredly ... but then they must be living and bad, and these pithless people are only galvanic [galvanized?] and vulgar. _We do not wish to be hard on Mr. Benson._ Let him give three years to investigating the distinctions between good writing and bad writing, between wit and vulgarity ... and then we should not be surprised if he produced something worth finding serious fault with.” (2) The (late) _Standard_. (A column and a half.) “Taking the book as a whole, it is an absolute failure. As a rule, the writing is forced and uneasy, the reflections confused or lumbering. The character-drawing is crude and uncertain. It is emphatically one of those books that are sensual, earthly and unwholesome.” (3) _Vanity Fair._ (One column.) “Of style he has little: of wit he has no idea ... of plot there is less in _The Rubicon_ than is generally to be found in a penny novelette: of knowledge of Society (if he have any) Mr. Benson shows less here than is usually possessed by the nursery-governess; and in grammar he seems to be as little expert as he is in natural science: of which his knowledge seems to equal his smattering of the Classics ... ill-named, full of faults, betraying much ignorance of manners and unknowledge [_sic_] of human nature: a book, indeed, compact of folly and slovenliness: guiltless of any real touch of constructive art; without form and void: a book of which I fear that I have made too much.” (4) _Daily Chronicle._ (One column.) “A PUZZLE FOR POSTERITY. What will the critical students of, say, two generations ahead, make of the fact that in the spring of 1894 the newspapers of London treated the appearance of a new novel by Mr. E. F. Benson as an event of striking importance in the world of books? The thought that death will rid us of the responsibility for that awkward explanation lends an almost welcome aspect to the grave....