“Ah, but then, Charles Lamb wrote so little!” was the remarkable answer.

Taylor did not write “so little.”  He wrote perhaps too much, and I think his heart was too strong for his brain.  He was far too simple and lovable a being to be great.  The atmosphere of gaiety which pervaded Lavender Sweep arose from his generous, kindly nature, which insisted that it was possible for everyone to have a good time.

Once, when we were rushing to catch a train with him, Kate hanging onto one arm and I onto the other, we all three fell down the station steps.  “Now, then, none of your jokes!” said a cross man behind us, who seemed to attribute our descent to rowdyism.  Taylor stood up with his soft felt hat bashed over one eye, his spectacles broken, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed!

Lavender Sweep was a sort of house of call for everyone of note.  Mazzini stayed there some time, and Steele Mackaye, the American actor who played that odd version of “Hamlet” at the Crystal Palace with Polly as Ophelia.  Perhaps a man with more acute literary conscience than Taylor would not have condescended to “write up” Shakespeare; perhaps a man of more independence and ambition would not have wasted his really fine accomplishment as a playwright for ever on adaptations.  That was his weakness—­if it was a weakness.  He lived entirely for his age, and so was more prominent in it than Charles Reade, for instance, whose name, no doubt, will live longer.

He put himself at the mercy of Whistler, once, in some Velasquez controversy of which I forget the details, but they are all set out, for those who like mordant ridicule, in “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.”

When Tom Taylor criticised acting he wrote as an expert, and he often said illuminating things to me about actors and actresses which I could apply over again to some of the players with whom I have been associated since.  “She is a curious example,” he said once of an actress of great conscientiousness, “of how far seriousness, sincerity, and weight will supply the place of almost all the other qualities of an actress.”  When a famous classic actress reappeared as Rosalind, he described her performance as “all minute-guns and minauderies, ... a foot between every word, and the intensity of the emphasis entirely destroying all the spontaneity and flow of spirits which alone excuse and explain; ... as unlike Shakespeare’s Rosalind, I will stake my head, as human personation could be!”

There was some talk at that time (the early ’seventies) of my playing Rosalind at Manchester for Mr. Charles Calvert, and Tom Taylor urged me to do it.  “Then,” he said charmingly, “I can sing my stage Nunc Dimittis.”  The whole plan fell through, including a project for me to star as Juliet to the Romeo of a lady!

I have already said that the Taylors’ home was one of the most softening and culturing influences of my early life.  Would that I could give an impression of the dear host at the head of his dinner-table, dressed in black silk knee-breeches and velvet cutaway coat—­a survival of a politer time, not an affectation of it—­beaming on his guests with his very brown eyes!