Needless to say, it was quickly accepted on my recommendation in another quarter, but by the break in our association which this incident occasioned, it chanced that I saw little of Mr. Weyman for some years to come. It was only when I had terminated my connection with the Magazine, and when I was occupied in the management of the Comedy Theatre, that a play was submitted to me by the foremost literary agent of the time, who said that he would not disclose the author’s name until its claims had been considered, but that he might mention that he was one of the most popular novelists of the day. I was quite unconscious that I had seen the play before, and with this strong recommendation I gave it the most careful attention, and wrote to the agent a long letter setting forth what I considered to be its defects from the point of view of the stage. As I felt bound to decline the play, I did not feel justified in making further inquiry as to its authorship, and it was not until long afterwards that I had a visit from Mr. Weyman, who produced from his pocket two letters which, he said, he thought I should be interested to see. They were my own two letters, written at widely different dates, upon this very play, and it was certainly, as he pointed out, a curious testimony to the constancy of my judgment that they absolutely agreed in opinion, and were in some instances almost identical in phrase. Strange and amusing experiences sometimes come to editors, especially to an editor of an illustrated magazine. I remember that Mr. Walter Crane had designed some very beautiful decorative work enshrining some poems of his own, and in several of the pages nude figures had been introduced, but treated in so ideal and imaginative a spirit that it seemed impossible they could provoke a protest even from an early Puritan; and yet immediately after their publication I received a letter of passionate rebuke from a reader of the Magazine dwelling in the suburbs, who with scathing criticism, obviously inspired by the loftiest moral indignation, recommended me, if I wished to study my own vile form, to look in the glass, and not, by giving such indecent pictures to the world, to pollute the purity of the reader’s home. The letter, I think, was dated from the Old Kent Road, and the only pleasure I could draw from it rested on the fact that my Magazine was entertained in so unsuspected a quarter. But it was not only from the humble homes of virtue that such criticism proceeded. While Hugh Conway’s story, _The Family Affair_, was running through the pages of the _English Illustrated_, I one day received a letter from the wife of an eminent judge, who told me that she could no longer permit the Magazine to lie upon her table, where it might at any time be read by her unmarried daughters.