complexion....  I hope you have seen the quiet little boxes at ——­’s foolish article.” (This refers to an article which attacked my Portia in Blackwood’s Magazine.) “Of course, if ——­ found his ideal in ——­ he must dislike you in Portia, or in anything where it is a case of grace and spontaneity and Nature against affectation, over-emphasis, stilt, and false idealism—­in short, utter lack of Nature.  How can the same critic admire both?  However, the public is with you, happily, as it is not always when the struggle is between good art and bad.”

I quote these dear letters from my friend, not in my praise, but in his.  Until his death in 1880, he never ceased to write to me sympathetically and encouragingly; he rejoiced in my success the more because he had felt himself in part responsible for my marriage and its unhappy ending, and had perhaps feared that my life would suffer.  Every little detail about me and my children, or about any of my family, was of interest to him.  He was never too busy to give an attentive ear to my difficulties.  “’Think of you lovingly if I can’!” he writes to me at a time when I had taken a course for which all blamed me, perhaps because they did not know enough to pardon enough—­savoir tout c’est tout pardonner.  “Can I think of you otherwise than lovingly? Never, if I know you and myself!”

Tom Taylor got through an enormous amount of work.  Dramatic critic and art critic for the Times, he was also editor of Punch and a busy playwright.  Everyone who wanted an address written or a play altered came to him, and his house was a kind of Mecca for pilgrims from America and from all parts of the world.  Yet he all the time occupied a position in a Government office—­the Home Office, I think it was—­and often walked from Whitehall to Lavender Sweep when his day’s work was done.  He was an enthusiastic amateur actor, his favorite part being Adam in “As You Like It,” perhaps because tradition says this was a part that Shakespeare played; at any rate, he was very good in it.  Gilbert and Sullivan, in very far-off days, used to be concerned in these amateur theatricals.  Their names were not associated then, but Kate and I established a prophetic link by carrying on a mild flirtation, I with Arthur Sullivan, Kate with Mr. Gilbert!

Taylor never wasted a moment.  He pottered, but thought deeply all the time; and when I used to watch him plucking at his gray beard, I realized that he was just as busy as if his pen had been plucking at his paper.  Many would-be writers complain that the necessity of earning a living in some other and more secure profession hinders them from achieving anything.  What about Taylor at the Home Office, Charles Lamb at East India House, and Rousseau copying music for bread?  It all depends on the point of view.  A young lady in Chicago, who has written some charming short stories, told me how eagerly she was looking forward to the time when she would be able to give up teaching and devote herself entirely to a literary career.  I wondered, and said I was never sure whether absolute freedom in such a matter was desirable.  Perhaps Charles Lamb was all the better for being a slave at the desk for so many years.