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Sporting Sketches

The author of “Sporting Stories and Sketches” (Kegan Paul), whose pleasure it is to preserve an incognito for which the contents of bis exceptionally entertaining work afford no admissible pretext, is not only a genial humourist, but a skilled adept in the science of psychological analysis, deeply versed, moreover, in the technical terminology of the racecourse, the hunting-field, and the cricket-ground. His acquaintance with the current slang of the turf, ana indeed of every variety of open-air sport, is so intimate and complete that anecdote and small-talk, couched in language of such subtle figurativeness as to suggest the need of a glossary to the uninitiated, flow with absolute spontaneity and naturalness from the mouths of his fictive personages, among whom may be reckoned some of the most astute and amusing rascals of times past or present. To say that these reprobates, as imagined or reproduced by “G. G.,” are funny is to pronounce an altogether inadequate appraisement of their intense and overpowering comicality.

Daily Telegraph & Courier (London), Friday 16 August 1895