[In the following review, Allen reviews Wakefield's Gallimaufry unfavorably by using words from one of the author's own characters.]

The word gallimaufry, so Mr. Wakefield informs us, is described in the New English Dictionary as a “hotch-potch” or “ragout.” Thus the reader is early informed [in Gallimaufry] that it is not Mr. Wakefield's intention to write an orthodox novel, with plot, climax and characterization, but rather a hotch-potch of conversations and incidents meant chiefly to amuse. The ambition may sound humble enough, but to recompense the reader for the complete absence of any story it is necessary for the ingredients of the hotch-potch to be of the very highest quality. Mr. Wakefield, although he never stops trying, has neither the verbal dexterity nor the neatness of conceit to make his book successful. The convention and opinions of a group of wealthy English people on an island in the Adriatic are kept keyed up to what some people will find an intolerable pitch of facetiousness, and Mr. Wakefield gives himself all too few chances of showing those imaginative powers that made They Return at Evening so satisfying a book. “She says she's sick of being proposed to by she-men with slim girlish voices, Narcissus complexes, Sitwellian attitudes and C3 tummy muscles,” says one character quoting another, and the comment of a third, “Laboured, precious and echoed phrases,” cruelly and unconsciously sums up the entire book.