Some Diverting Contrasts of Opinion Concerning Flatland

``Life is too short for it to be worth anybody's while to attempt to solve or comprehend the solemn jokes, the labored jocoseness, which the unannounced author of this nondescript production perpetrates.''

``Perhaps the essay is the desperate facetiousness of a long-suffering student of geometry.''

`` ... the thing is arrant and witless and inexcusable nonsense.''

`` ... it is mortally tedious ... we prescribe it as a soporific.''

``We frankly say that we are at a loss as to the meaning and purpose of this queer little book.''

``For the most part the reader will be puzzled to know what it is all about, and so prolix and dry is the style that he will hardly care to bother himself with guessing. It is a book of 155 pages. All that there is of any value in it might have been put into 10 pages.''

``Nothing is much more contemptible in this mundane sphere than to pretend to do, or to be, or to know when one can neither do, nor be, nor know, but contrariwise only make pretense, and is in a word a Humbug. Now, any many that shall pretend to know what this book means is of necessity a humbug.''

``With so much wit and grace of style is this clever satire on the limits of our knowledge wrought out that we shall not be surprised to see it take a permanent place in literature.''

`` `Flatland' is one of the most clever and fascinating books of the season.''

``A work that will find a place among the cleverest satires of history.''

``A remarkable book which serves notice to man to keep away from Flatland. It is an original and great power.''

``The idea is well worked up and the little book is worthy of a place beside the Lilliput, Brobdignag and the Houyhnhnms of the great dean of St. Patricks.''

``The book is mathematically correct,
which adds to its remarkable cleverness.''

``Few could read this brochure without having the mind broadened in consequence of its perusal.''

``It is exceedingly clever and entertaining.''

``The satire is as intense as that of `Gulliver's Travels'.''