Born, at Sunderland, 1817. Early education at school there. Studied at Glasgow Univ., 1831–32, 1835–36. Matric., Trin. Coll., Camb., 1837; B.A., 1840; Fellow 1842; M.A., 1843. Prof. of English Literature, Univ. Coll., London. Called to Bar at Middle Temple, Nov. 1845. Assistant Sec. to Board of Health, 1850; Sec., 1854. Married Laura W. Barker, 19 June 1855. Sec. to Local Government Act Office, 1858–72. Wrote over 100 dramatic pieces, 1845–80. Editor of “Punch,” 1874–80. For some time Art Critic to “The Times” and “The Graphic.” Died, at Wandsworth, 12 July 1880. Works: “The King’s Rival” (with Charles Reade), 1854; “Masks and Faces” (with Charles Reade), 1854; “Two Loves and a Life” (with Charles Reade), 1854; “Barefaced Impositors” (anon.; with F. G. B. Ponsonby and G. C. Bentinck) [1854]; “The Local Government Act, 1858, etc.,” 1858; “The Railway Station, painted by W. P. Frith, described,” 1862; “Handbook of the Pictures in the International Exhibition of 1862,” 1862; Text to Birket Foster’s “Pictures of English Landscapes,” 1863 [1862]; “A Marriage Memorial” [1863], “Catalogue of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds” (with C. W. Franks), 1869; “The Theatre in England” (from “The Dark Blue”), 1871; “Leicester Square,” 1874; “Historical Dramas,” 1877. [Also a number of separate dramatic pieces, published in Lacy’s Acting Edition of Plays.] He translated: Vicomte Hersart de La Villemarqué’s “Ballads and Songs of Brittany,” 1865; and edited: “The Life of B. R. Haydon,” 1853; C. R. Leslie’s “Autobiographical Recollections,” 1860; Mortimer Collins’ “Pen Sketches by a Vanished Hand,” 1879.

Personal

  Certainly the highest-toned of all the “Punch” and “Household Words” school—a Cambridge scholar, who, to maintain his mother and sisters, submitted to very distasteful literary toil, even theatrical burlesques, but who has come out of it unstained, and will be, I predict, amongst the most eminent of our new writers.

  He is a tall, slender, dark young man, not English-looking, and wearing colored spectacles, so that I should readily have taken him for an American literary man.

  Claude Mellot seems to have come into a fortune of late years, large enough at least for his few wants. He paints no longer, save when he chooses; and has taken a little old house in one of those back lanes of Brompton where islands of primæval nursery garden still remain undevoured by the advancing surges of the brick and mortar deluge. There he lives, happy in a green lawn and windows opening thereon, in three elms, a cork, an ilex and a mulberry, with a great standard pear, for flower and foliage the queen of all suburban 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.

  My vis-à-vis happened to be Tom Taylor, who was decidedly the liveliest of the company. Tom was a man of thirty-eight, [1857] or thereabouts, rather tall than short, well-built, with a strong, squarish face, black eyes, hair, and moustache, and a gay, cheerful, wide-awake 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.”

  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.

  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 half-dozen 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 method—opera-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 was 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.

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.

  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 themselves sadly—chaff! Go back!

  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?

  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 art-critics—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.

  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.

  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 diverse—less 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.

  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.

  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.

  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 melodrama of our time, “The Ticket-of-Leave Man,” because it was adapted, and very well adapted too, from a fine play by Brisebarre and Nus, called “Leonard,” and went cheap for the very good reason that there was no protection for stolen goods, and any manager could employ a hack writer to give him another version of “Leonard.”