SOURCE: An introduction to Selected Essays of E. V. Lucas, Methuen Ltd., 1954, pp. v-x.

In the following essay, Wethered describes Lucas as a writer and a person.

E. V. Lucas subtitled one of his best known anthologies, The Friendly Town, an opposite number, mainly in prose, to The Open Road, with the words 'A Little Book for the Urbane'. Apart from the witticism there was much in it that was characteristic of the writer: for Lucas was not only courteous and urbane but wrote particularly for urbane readers. He studiously avoided ever being didactic, sedulously avoiding any taint of the instinct for teaching. Everything that mattered was to pass on what was 'interesting' to himself—(he actually wrote an essay on the word saying what would he do without it)—pictures, places, books (to which his numerous anthologies bear witness), not to mention the pleasures of the table...