“This short book is worth a dozen of the silly volumes that now flood the book-market. It preserves country lore of the sort that is fast decaying, mingled with travel notes, a few details of scholarship and family history. The ordinary local historian is industrious, but wanting in other ways. Mr Torr is a scholar: he has, too, an excellent sense of humour, an inquiring mind and an observant eye.”--_Saturday Review._ “A man who takes a keen interest in his ancestral place and in his humble neighbours, and who at the same time is in touch with the world of scholarship through his special studies, may be said to make the most of life.... Mr Torr, like a true scholar, wastes no words. The essence of the ordinary book of memoirs, as he knows, is in the anecdotes. He therefore gives the anecdotes without the usual framework, telling them neatly and briefly, and passing from one subject to another without even a chapter-heading to break the flow of good talk.”--_Spectator._ “Mr Torr’s book is as typically English as a Christmas pudding.... His book is far more than a local history, however; it should be read as a complementary volume to _Mansfield Park_ and _Pendennis_, to _Life’s Little Ironies_ and _The Way of all Flesh_.... From Mr Torr we learn just how good life could be for a wealthy, self-contained, enterprising Englishman in the last hundred years or so. It was all more or less comic relief to him. Old walls are almost serious, and old roofs, and the beauty of fine days and fine landscape; the rest is good fun.”--_Athenæum._ “He has travelled and written books, he is a depository of odd lore, sometimes local, sometimes classical, sometimes smacking of the great world. Intermixed with his own chatty reminiscences he gives us extracts from old family letters and other glimpses of days which the war has caused to seem further off than they are. Reading this charming little book is very much like listening to the squire gossiping by his own fireside.”--_Guardian._ “And when we close his book and try to recollect what it was in it that made it so hard to lay down, we begin to be aware that his converse with us has flowed on in just that artless inevitable way: one thing, as the saying goes, leads to another.... He has charm; and the charm of this extraordinary book we despair of conveying by any quotation or any description; we can only say it is there.”--_Field._ “He goes from story to story, from oddment to oddment, wasting no time in generalisations or connecting platitudes. The result is an extraordinary medley that might almost (save only for a few dates) have been written fifty years ago, or fifty years hence, by a man of Mr Torr’s knowledge, habits, and temperament, and that could have been read with as much pleasure by a man of George I’s reign as it probably will be by people who accidentally run across it in the reign of George XII.”--_Land and Water._