I was very fond of my own father, but in many ways Tom Taylor was more of a father to me than my father in blood.  Father was charming, but Irish and irresponsible.  I think he loved my sister Floss and me most because we were the lawless ones of the family!  It was not in his temperament to give wise advice and counsel.  Having bequeathed to me light-heartedness and a sanguine disposition, and trained me splendidly for my profession in childhood, he became in after years a very cormorant for adulation of me!

“Duchess, you might have been anything!” was his favorite comment, when I was not living up to his ideas of my position and attainments.  And I used to answer:  “I’ve played my cards for what I want.”

Years afterwards, when he and mother used to come to first nights at the Lyceum, the grossest flattery of me after the performance was not good enough for them.

“How proud you must be of her!” someone would say.  “How well this part suits her!”

“Yes,” father would answer, in a sort of “is-that-all-you-have-to-say” tone.  “But she ought to play Rosalind!”

To him I owe the gaiety of temperament which has enabled me to dance through the most harsh and desert passages of my life, just as he used to make Kate and me dance along the sordid London streets as we walked home from the Princess’s Theater.  He would make us come under his cloak, partly for warmth, partly to hide from us the stages of the journey home.  From the comfortable darkness one of us would cry out: 

“Oh, I’m so tired!  Aren’t we nearly home?  Where are we, father?”

“You know Schwab, the baker?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, we’re not there yet!”

As I grew up, this teasing, jolly, insouciant Irish father of mine was relieved of some of his paternal duties by Tom Taylor.  It was not Nelly alone whom Tom Taylor fathered.  He adopted the whole family.

At Lavender Sweep, with the horse-chestnut blossoms strewing the drive and making it look like a tessellated pavement, all of us were always welcome, and Tom Taylor would often come to our house and ask mother to grill him a bone!  Such intimate friendships are seldom possible in our busy profession, and there was never another Tom Taylor in my life.

When we were not in London and could not go to Lavender Sweep to see him, he wrote almost daily to us.  He was angry when other people criticised me, but he did not spare criticism himself.

“Don’t be Nelly Know-all,” I remember his saying once. “I saw you floundering out of your depth to-night on the subject of butterflies!  The man to whom you were talking is one of the greatest entomologists in Europe, and must have seen through you at once.”

When William Black’s “Madcap Violet” was published, common report said that the heroine had been drawn for Ellen Terry, and some of the reviews made Taylor furious.

“It’s disgraceful!  I shall deny it.  Never will I let it be said of you that you could conceive any vulgarity.  I shall write and contradict it.  Indiscreet, high-spirited, full of surprises, you may be, but vulgar—­never!  I shall write at once.”