“If by ‘small talk’ is meant gossip, Mr Torr will not be offended if we say that this is one of the pleasantest books of gossip which we ever came across.... The district is a little out of the world, and it is no wonder that some of the pleasant superstitions of rural England have not died out there.... The family were great travellers, and many parallel examples from other countries are adduced to illustrate the superstitions of Devonshire.”--_Country Life._ “Mr Torr was well advised by his friends to publish these jottings, originally intended for private circulation. They will specially interest Devonians, as they are mostly about the manners and customs, superstitions and traditions of that fascinating county in the days before railways, but they give you glimpses also of later days and of places of more general interest, of Italy, for example, when under the intolerable tyranny of Austria, and of France when in the throes of the Franco-Prussian War, and even a glimpse of Napoleon the First.”--_Truth._ “We are grateful that in days like these he has drawn from his store of reminiscences such a delightful and varied assortment of small talk. He brings to his aid, too, diaries and letters of relatives as keenly observant and as alert and shrewd as himself.”--_Queen._ “My first thought was, ‘What on earth is the University Press doing with small talk in an obscure village?’ My second was, ‘How enterprising they were to get hold of such an odd and excellent book!’... I do not know any book in which so many characteristic and uniformly good stories of Devonshire people are to be found.... But he has gone far beyond the locality. He is liable to touch on anything in the world except his inner self. That is a pity. A little more egoism would have made his book even better.”--_The New Statesman._ “‘I meant,’ writes the author of this attractive miscellany, ‘to keep to local matters, but it has gone much further than that.’ It has. _Small Talk at Wreyland_ travels over half the world and many centuries of history.... The ordinary reader who merely wishes to roam the world without leaving his own fireside will find Mr Torr a delightful companion.”--_Outlook._ “It is seldom that one comes on so good a volume of gossip as _Small Talk at Wreyland_.... _Emma_ itself hardly throws more light on the comic side of human nature than do some of these old letters.... But it is for its glimpses of life in Wreyland, not of the larger world, that one will return again and again to Mr Torr’s most entertaining book.”--_Everyman._ “So we look for the kind of book an accomplished scholar produces, and we are not disappointed, though Mr Torr has left his materials in ‘most admired disorder.’... With Mr Torr some new theme is always turning up--we never know quite how or when.... We are obliged to him for some capital gossip, and we shall be glad to have more.”--_Notes and Queries._