“The writer, living about 1925, gives his son an account of his adventures as a Volunteer during the invasion of England fifty years before, and so powerful is the narrative, so intensely real the impression it produces, that the coolest disbeliever in panics cannot read it without a flush of annoyance, or close it without the thought that after all, as the world now stands, some such humiliation for England is at least possible.” * * * * “If the writer is, as reported, Col. Hamley, then Col. Hamley, when he wrote the charming story of “Lady Lee's Widowhood,” misconceived, as a novelist, the nature of his own powers. He should rival Defoe, not Anthony Trollope.”
—London “Spectator,” May 13, 1871.
