=The Daily Telegraph.=—‘_The King of Schnorrers_, like _Children of the Ghetto_, depicts the habits and characteristics of Israel in London with painstaking elaborateness and apparent verisimilitude. _The King of Schnorrers_ is a character-sketch which deals with the manners and customs of native and foreign Jews as they “lived and had their being” in the London of a century and a quarter ago.’
=The Daily Chronicle.=—‘It is a beautiful story. _The King of Schnorrers_ is that great rarity—an entirely new thing, that is as good as it is new.’
=The Glasgow Herald.-=-‘On the whole, the book does justice to Mr. Zangwill’s rapidly-growing reputation, and the character of Manasseh ought to live.’
=The World.=—‘The exuberant and even occasionally overpowering humour of Mr. Zangwill is at his highest mark in his new volume, _The King of Schnorrers_.’
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.
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=The Cambridge (University) Review.=—‘That the book will have readers in a future generation we do not doubt, for there is much in it that is of lasting merit.’
=The Graphic.=—‘It might be worth the while of some industrious and capable person with plenty of leisure to reproduce in a volume of reasonable size the epigrams and other good things witty and serious which _The Premier and the Painter_ contains. There are plenty of them, and many are worth noting and remembering,’
=St. James’s Gazette.=—‘The satire hits all round with much impartiality; while one striking situation succeeds another till the reader is altogether dazzled. The story is full of life and “go” and brightness, and will well repay perusal.’
=The Athenæum.=—‘In spite of its close print and its five hundred pages _The Premier and the Painter_ is not very difficult to read. To speak of it, however, is difficult. It is the sort of book that demands yet defies quotation for one thing; and for another it is the sort of book the description of which as “very clever” is at once inevitable and inadequate. In some ways it is original enough to be a law unto itself, and withal as attractive in its whimsical, wrong-headed way, as at times it is tantalising, bewildering, even tedious. The theme is politics and politicians, and the treatment, while for the most part satirical and prosaic, is often touched with sentiment, and sometimes even with a fantastic kind of poetry. The several episodes of the story are wildly fanciful in themselves and are clumsily connected; but the streak of humorous cynicism which shows through all of them is both curious and pleasing. Again, it has to be claimed for the author that—as is shown to admiration by his presentation of the excellent Mrs. Dawe and her cookshop—he is capable, when he pleases, of insight and observation of a high order, and therewith of a masterly sobriety of tone. But he cannot be depended upon for the length of a single page; he seeks his effects and his material when and where he pleases. In some respects his method is not, perhaps, altogether unlike Lord Beaconsfield’s. To our thinking, however, he is strong enough to go alone, and to go far.’