"War to the Knife;" or, Tangata Maori by Rolf Boldrewood (100 best novels of all time TXT) 📕

ACADEMY.—"A book to read, and a book to keep after reading. Mr. Allen's gifts are many—a style pellucid and picturesque, a vivid and disciplined power of characterization, and an intimate knowledge of a striking epoch and an alluring country.... So magical is the wilderness environment, so fresh the characters, so buoyant the life they lead, so companionable, so well balanced, and so touched with humanity, the author's personality, that I hereby send him greeting and thanks for a brave book.... The Choir Invisible is a fine achievement."

PALL MALL GAZETTE.—Mr. Allen's power of character drawing invests the old, old story with renewed and absorbing interest.... The fascination of the story lies in great part in Mr. Allen's graceful and vivid style."

DAILY MAIL.—"The Choir Invisible is one of those very few books which help one to live. And hereby it is beautiful even more than by reason of its absolute purity of style, its splendid descriptions of nature, and the level grandeur of its severe, yet warm and passionate atmosphere."

BRITISH WEEKLY.—"Certainly this is no commonplace book, and I have failed to do justice to its beauty, its picturesqueness, its style, its frequent nobility of feeling, and its large, patient charity."

SPEAKER.—"We trust that there are few who read it who will fail to regard its perusal as one of the new pleasures of their lives.... One of those rare stories which make a direct appeal alike to the taste and feeling of most men and women, and which afford a gratification that is far greater than that of mere critical approval. It is, in plain English, a beautiful book—beautiful in language and in sentiments, in design and in execution. Its chief merit lies in the fact that Mr. Allen has grasped the true spirit of historical romance, and has shown how fully he understands both the links which unite, and the time-spaces which divide, the different generations of man."

SATURDAY REVIEW.—"Mr. James Lane Allen is a writer who cannot well put pen to paper without revealing how finely sensitive he is to beauty."

BOOKMAN.—"The main interest is not the revival of old times, but a love-story which might be of today, or any day, a story which reminds one very pleasantly of Harry Esmond and Lady Castlewood."

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.—"We think he will be a novelist, perhaps even a great novelist—one of the few who hold large powers of divers sort in solution to be precipitated in some new unexpected form."

GUARDIAN.—"One of those rare books that will bear reading many times."

DAILY NEWS.—"Mr. J. L. Allen shows himself a delicate observer, and a fine literary artist in The Choir Invisible."

ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE.—"A book that should be read by all those who ask for something besides sensationalism in their fiction."

SPECTATOR.—"Marked by beauty of conception, reticence of treatment, and it has an atmosphere all its own."

DAILY CHRONICLE.—"It is written with singular delicacy and has an old-world fragrance which seems to come from the classics we keep in lavender.... There are few who can approach his delicate execution in the painting of ideal tenderness and fleeting moods."