“‘The City of Dreadful Night’ ranks with Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat as a lyrical expression of despair, and it strikes a deeper note.”—Daily News.

“Thomson’s work ... has intensity, it has grip, it has that power of imaginative realism which gives to conceptions, embodied in words, the arresting quality of objects present to sense.... He was a creator and a singer, and in his creation and in his song his powers were finely co-ordinated to imaginative ends. Even his most repellently pessimistic verse has the fascination of gloomy grandeur, and when, as in such poems as ‘The Happy Poet’ and ‘Sunday up the River,’ he rises into an ampler ether, a diviner air, his verse has not only the impressiveness of power, but the witchery of delight.”—Westminster Gazette.

“Messrs. Reeves & Turner and Mr. Dobell have published in two volumes the collected works of James Thomson, the poet of that ‘melancholia which transcends all wit,’ as he terms it himself. The sad story of his life is told with sympathy and fairness in a memoir by Mr. Bertram Dobell, who has edited the work. The pessimistic and heterodox utterances of the author of ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ were never likely to be very popular, but this excellent edition will be very welcome to many who know the strength and true poetry of many of his writings.”—Daily Telegraph.