trees. Claude's house is arranged with his usual defiance of all conventionalities. Dining or drawing-room proper there is none. The large front room is the studio, where he and Sebina eat and drink as well as work and paint, and out of it opens a little room, the walls of which are all covered with gems of art (where the rogue finds money to buy them is a puzzle), that the eye can turn nowhere without taking in some new beauty, and wandering on from picture to statue, from portrait to landscape, dreaming and learning afresh after every glance.-KINGSLEY, CHARLES, 1857, Two Years Ago.

My vis-à-vis happened to be Tom Taylor, who was decidedly the liveliest of the company. Tom was a man of thirtyeight, [1857] or thereabouts, rather tall than short, well-built, with a strong, squarish face, black eyes, hair, and moustache, and a gay, cheerful, wideawake air, denoting a happy mixture of the imaginative and the practical faculties. He was always ready to join in the laugh, and to crown it by provoking another. In fact, he showed so little of English reserve, so much of unembarrassed American bonhommie, that we ought, properly, to call him, "Our English Cousin."-TAYLOR, BAYARD, 1862, Personal Sketches, At Home and Abroad, Second Series, p. 418.

His everyday life was as unlike that of Claude Mellot as could be, for besides his office work, which was done most punctually and diligently, he had always a play on the stocks, and work for Punch, or the magazines, on hand. He was at his desk early every morning, often at five o'clock, for three hours' work before breakfast, after swallowing a cup of milk. And I believe it was this wealth of work of many kinds which gave such a zest to the recreation at Eagle Lodge on those summer evenings. Then, in play hours, if the company were at all sympathetic-and very little company came there which was not so he would turn himself loose, and give the rein to those glorious and most genial high spirits, which thawed all reserves, timidities, and conventionalities, and transformed all present for the time being into a group of rollicking children at play, with our host as showman, stage manager, chief tumbler, leader of all the revels. In the power and faculty for excellent fooling, which ran through every mood, from the

grotesque to the pathetic, but with no faintest taint of coarseness, or malice, or unkindliness, and of luring all kinds of people to join in it, no one in our day has come near him.-HUGHES, THOMAS, 1880, In Memoriam, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 42, p. 298.

That Tom Taylor realised and did his duty with conscientiousness is certain. With those fellow-critics who were wont to meet him at the exhibitions, and to pursue with him the dusty labours of the press day, his minuteness and steadiness were proverbial. Most of us take in the side of a room at a general glance, and then proceed to the further consideration of the halfdozen pictures which for some quality or other have taken our eye; but he gave separate and deliberate attention to every one without exception. It is no exaggeration to say that he often went through the entire catalogue without missing a number, and he did his work with so much methodopera-glass in hand, and the case slung across his shoulders-that the more erratic journalists who had been excited by the premonitory whispers of the studios to make a zigzag flight through the rooms in search of excitement, were frequently but half through their work while he serenely finishing the last of his last hundred, putting up his glass, and exchanging a serious nod with his friends, or perhaps pausing for the first time to listen to the last good thing which Mr. Sala might be saying to a little knot of less business-like emissaries of the press, on his way out.-OLDCASTLE, JOHN, 1881, Bundles of Rue, Magazine of Art, vol. 4, p. 66.

GENERAL

The new play at the Haymarket ["Masks and Faces"] wants the scope and proportions of a regular English comedy, being in outline and structure of a French cast; but in character it is English, in sentiment thoroughly so, and its language and expression, whether of seriousness or humour, have the tone at once easy and earnest which truth gives to scholarship and wit. -MORLEY, HENRY, 1852, Journal of a London Playgoer, Nov. 27, p. 56.

Why, my dear old Tom, I never was serious with you, even when you were among us. Indeed, I killed you, quite, as who should say, without seriousness, "A rat! A rat!" you know, rather cursorily.

Chaff, Tom, as in your present state you are beginning to perceive, was your fate here, and doubtless will be throughout the eternity before you. With ages at your disposal, this truth will dimly dawn upon you; and as you look back upon this life, perhaps many situations that you took au sérieux (art-critic, who knows? expounder of Velasquez, and what not) will explain themslves sadly-chaff! Go back! -WHISTLER, J. M'NEILL, 1879, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, p. 39.

He was very able in many ways, as scholar, poet, critic, dramatist; but we have had greater men than he in our generation in each one of these lines, and greater men are left among us. But where shall we turn for the man who will prove such a spring of pure, healthy, buoyant, and kindly fun for the next, as he has been to us for the last thirty years?-HUGHES, THOMAS, 1880, In Memoriam, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 42, p. 298.

Tom Taylor was not a brilliant critic, but he was a sure one; he had no touch of genius to guide him in his verdicts, but he had long training and an infinite capacity for taking pains. There are many artists who can claim the greatest of living artcritics-Mr. Ruskin as the foster-father of their art; his writing has inspired the first efforts which his criticism afterwards

corrected. Tom Taylor did not inspire, because he did not create; but in his measure he did much to discover and encourage talent in the young and the obscure; and there are several artists, who can remember the delight with which they read the good word in the Times about their earliest exhibited productions. On the other hand, Tom Taylor was fearless, as Mr. Ruskin has been fearless, to condemn what he thought deserved to be condemned.OLDCASTLE, JOHN, 1881, Bundles of Rue, Magazine of Art, vol. 4, p. 66.

That the idea of making Peg Woffington the heroine of a play was exclusively Charles Reade's; that the shaping of the play into the form in which it was finally produced was Tom Taylor's. But that the credit of the play should be equally divided between the two authors, as each brought to the work qualities and powers peculiarly his own, the ultimate result being the production of certainly one of the very best and finished comedies of modern times.TAYLOR, ARNOLD, 1886, Letter, Oct. 11;

Charles Reade by Charles L., and Rev. Compton Reade, p. 193.

Worthy to rank with Mr. Wills as a poetical dramatist, is Mr. Tom Taylor, who is at once the most successful writer of his class, with only one exception, and the bête noir of a large clique of critics. Mr. Taylor is less original but more diverseless happy, but more careful, than Mr. Wills; and his dialogue, though bald like most modern dialogue, is more apt and to the purpose. I am certainly not among

those gentlemen who deny Mr. Taylor the merit of originality; on the contrary, I believe his talents are underrated, simply because a foolish and erroneous idea has been circulated as to his indebtedness to foreign sources. To my mind he has

seldom or never exceeded the allowable privileges of a dramatist, and almost all his success is due to dramatic faculties and instincts entirely his own. He is the author of some of the very brightest pieces of the day, and if in his historical and poetical productions he has failed to maintain a high level of literary excellence, he has merely failed in common with almost all caterers for the modern stage.BUCHANAN, ROBERT, 1886, The Modern Stage, A Look Round Literature, p. 253.

Tom Taylor was a ripe, classical scholar, and an admirable playwright; he was essentially clever, just, and upright, but he was not very much gifted with either wit or humour in the true sense of the term. Beyond his exceedingly droll "Adventures of an Unprotected Female," I cannot recall any Punch contributions of his which were absolutely comic; and, being altogether bereft of an ear for music, the poetry on which he occasionally ventured was, as a rule, deplorably cacophonous.-SALA, tures, vol. II, p. 246. GEORGE AUGUSTUS, 1895, Life and Adven

He essayed almost every department of the drama, but made his chief success in domestic comedy. His mastery of stagecraft was great, and many of his pieces still keep the boards; but he lacked dramatic genius or commanding power of expression.

KENT, CHARLES, 1898, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LV, p. 473.

Original writers were perpetually snubbed and Tom Taylor, a very able writer, and as quick as lightning, was glad enough to accept £150 down for the most successful

fustian, and sentiment which chiefly displayed itself in maudlin clap-traphad been the main attributes and aims of most of the dramatists of the first quarter of the century. Planché introduced into his works elements which gave a fresh direction to the comedy writers of the period. True, they were redolent of hairpowder and bedecked with patches; but they had a pleasant smack of elegance and grace; and, although not displaying the breadth of low comedy, the tendency to fine heavily-phrased writing, or the platitudes of artificial sentiment which were the prevailing characteristics of most of his immediate predecessors, they were accepted with delight by the public. In adopting and adapting French models he had imbued himself with the spirit of the French school, and almost founded a new school of his own. "The natural," somewhat heightened in colour by the stage rouge, which is more or less necessary to all dramatic doings, and the due proportions of which were well taught by his foreign prototypes, took the place of stereotyped artificiality. SIMPSON, J. PALGRAVE, 1880, James Robinson Planché, The Theatre, vol. 5, p. 96.

scribed as burlesques. Their writer had a vein of poetry as well as a frolic wit; he never stooped to vulgarity or brainless buffoonery. He adhered as closely as he could to the lines of the old stories which he cast into dramatic form. His fairy plays are brimful of humour and graceful fancy, ringing with mirth and music, lightly touched here and there with the colours of romance. There blows through them a breath from the country over the hills and far away, not, it is true, from the moonlight-coloured dreamland of the olden fairy poetry, but from the powdered and perfumed and delightfully modish world of gruff, bluff kings, and bombastic chancellors, and foppish wiseacres, and shrewish queens, and machinating cooks, and charming oppressed princesses, and town-witted elves the world into which Thackeray leads us when he introduces us to Rosalba and Bulbo.-WHYTE, WALTER, 1894, The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, Humour, Society, Parody and Occasional Verse, ed. Miles, pp. 218, 220.

From 1818 onward Planché was the author, adapter, translator, and what not, of innumerable-they certainly run to hundreds-dramatic pieces of every possible sort from regular plays to sheer extravaganzas. He was happiest perhaps in the lighter and freer kinds, having a pleasant and never vulgar style of jocular

He was an assiduous student of archæology . . . A great deal that Planché has written is not literature. In even his best comedies his style can hardly be called brilliant, while his characters are drawn on more or less conventional lines. But the dialogue is dramatically effective and the plots are neatly constructed. The imbroglio in "The Follies of a Night" (perhaps the most entertaining of his comedies), is managed with delightful address. It is in his extravaganzas, however, that his peculiar talent shines out most brightly. These little pieces cannot properly be de

knowledge of what is a play. But he stands only on the verge of literature proper, and the propriety, indeed the necessity, of including him here is the strongest possible evidence of the poverty of dramatic literature in our period. It would indeed only be possible to extend this chapter much by including men who have no real claim to appear, and who would too forcibly suggest the hired guests of story, introduced in order to avoid a too obtrusive confession of the absence of guests entitled to be present.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 423.

More graceful extravaganzas than those written for the Lyceum by Planché were never seen on any stage. The versification was always neat and admirable, the rhyming faultless, and the puns of the very best kind.-SCOTT, CLEMENT, 1899, The Drama of Yesterday and To-day, vol. II. р. 190.