"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."