In his Round the World in Any Number of Days Maurice Baring says that ‘The most precious of all books are those which seem to do the work for you. You don’t have to bother; you are not aware that you are reading’. His list includes Tolstoy, Trollope, and that most lovable of writers, William De Morgan; to them we might add his own name and work. The easiest and friendliest author of our generation, and one of the most distinguished, has gone, now that he is dead; he can be matched in certain qualities, surpassed in some, but there is—there always will be—only one Maurice Baring. His peculiar charm almost eludes analysis, and analysis appears an absurdly pedantic word to use in talking of one who so deprecated pedantry; but one tries to describe his quality for the mere pleasure of writing about it.

His style is like good manners, unobtrusive, almost unnoticeable, but, like good manners, enjoyable and, also like good manners, part of himself, neither a pose nor an acquisition. In catholicity of taste and. culture he can hardly have been matched among the most scholarly writers of his generation; in this, indeed, he would seem to belong to a more suave and lettered age than ours. But he could never have ‘played the sedulous ape’ unless out of Puckish criticism, as in his delicious drolleries Dead Letters and Lost Diaries, which are so often exactly what the celebrities concerned ought to have said or written.