He professed the greatest contempt, and considering the financial failure of his management of the Queen's Theatre, perhaps naturally so, for those stingy votaries of pleasure who were always cadging him for orders for his theatre. "Theirs," he said, "is the meanest, most sneaky and contemptible form of beggary." But he got the better of one of these beggars. One day his tailor asked him for an order. He sent it to him, but the next morning he sent the tailor an "order" entitling the bearer to a new suit of clothes. The tailor, realising the tit for tat, sensibly complied with the request, but ever afterwards bought his tickets for the "Queen's" in the conventional manner. Another set of persons who encountered his righteous wrath in his theatre days were the would-be dramatic authors. He described how hundreds of worthless plays were sent him, resembling, in their incoherence and lack of perspective, the crude pencil drawings of infants. He gave in _Truth_ the opening of one of them, further than which, he explained, he did not read: {103} "The broad Mississippi is seen rolling its turbid flood towards the ocean, and carrying with it the debris of a village. Steamers come and go on its surface. On a frail raft a man and a woman are crossing the river. Enter the negroes from a plantation monotonously singing."[13] He attributed the failure of his own adaptation of Sardou's _La Patrie_ to the narrow powers of appreciation possessed by Londoners. "They fancy," he wrote, "that no drama or melodrama can be good, which does not conform to certain rules. The heroine must be the purest and the best of her sex; she must engage in a struggle with adverse circumstances, and with bad men; and she must emerge, in the last act, triumphant. The audience, in fact, must leave the theatre, not only pleased with her acting, but with her. Now, the heroine of _Fatherland_ is Dolores, and the plot turns upon her betrayal of her husband. This was fatal to the success of the play, but it is an open question whether it ought to have been fatal to it. Conventionalism is the bane of advance in art."