Francis Kilvert

"Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist."

"The Vicar of St Ives says the smell of fish there is sometimes so terrific as to stop the church clock."

"It is a fine thing to be out on the hills alone. A man can hardly be a beast or a fool alone on a great mountain."

"An angel satyr walks these hills."

"Why do I keep this voluminous journal? I can hardly tell. Partly because life seems to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me."

"The best picture of quiet vicarage life in Victorian England that has yet been given us."

"He's so bright-eyed it makes one unconscionably glad to be alive."

"He was certainly not a man wrapped up in himself, and perhaps the chief merit of the Diary is that it afford a detailed and objective picture of life in a remote and beautiful part of the country about seventy years ago."

"It gives an extraordinarily sensitive and observant picture of country life in the seventies, mostly of Radnorshire and central Wales, where Kilvert was a curate, but also of the west country, for his home was in Wiltshire, and during this year, 1870–1, he visited a good deal in Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset. But, more important, he wrote like an angel; his gift was for prose rather than verse — though his verses are quite charming too. The result is an addition to literature."

"I should place his Diary among the best half-dozen or dozen ever written in England. It is the quintessence of England, and the English attitude to life, to the country, to people, even though most of it, and the best part of it too, was written against that beautiful background of central Wales, the Breconshire Beacons, the lovely mountains and valleys in view."

"The point about Kilvert is that he was the master of a most exquisite and lovely prose, and the Diary that he kept is not merely a revealing document of the social life of the countryside in his time — it is certainly that — but one of the first half-dozen diaries, and that not the least moving, in our literature."

"It is a perfect little landscape, like a Constable, and that is the kind of thing that Kilvert can do on every page. More often, he is rendering life, from close-up observation and with the tenderest, most exquisite sympathy for every sort of human being... It is a world of rural deans, and tea on rectory lawns under the trees, and, after tea, archery or croquet, or picking flowers in the flowery meads of Wiltshire for decorating the church, of pretty Victorian girls looking over the parapet of the bridge while the river flows by. And all the while there is one, a little apart, watching life itself flowing by, trying to catch it on the wing, to ensnare a momentary aspect of its beauty, with what quivering sensibility, with what nostalgia for what is passing, even as it passes, in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase."

"He was a man—however obscure until now—of remarkable personality: a man with a natural feeling for the best things, for religion, for literature, for the countryside, for birds and flowers, above all for wayfaring men and women and specially children. Moreover he had a sense of humour."

"The discovery of the extensive diary of the Reverend Francis Kilvert some years ago added a new classic to English diary literature."