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.

"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