SOURCE: "John Davys Beresford," in Gods of Modem Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors, Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1923, pp. 33-39.

In the following essay, Adcock surveys thematic elements in Beresford's major works.

There seems to be something in the atmosphere of the manse and the vicarage that has a notable effect of developing in many who breathe it a capacity for writing fiction. Not a few authors have been cradled into literature by the Law, Medicine and the Army, but as a literary incubator no profession can vie with the Church. If it has produced no poet of the highest rank, it gave us Donne, Herrick, Herbert, Crashaw, Young, Crabbe, and a multitude of lesser note, and if it has yielded no greater novelists than Sterne and Kingsley, it has fostered a vast number that have, in their day, made up in popularity for what they lacked in...