" (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.
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