The late Sir William S. Gilbert was a dear and valued friend of mine for many years. One of the most brilliant companions I ever knew when he chose, and one of the dullest when something had put him out. He talked as wittily as he wrote, and many of his letters are teeming with quaint idiosyncrasies. He was a perennial boy with delicious quirk. So few people are as interesting as their work—they reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books. W. S. Gilbert was an exception—he was as amusing as his _Bab Ballads_, and as sarcastic as “H.M.S. Pinafore.” A sparkling librettist, he was likewise a brilliant talker. How he loved a joke, even against himself! How well he told a story, even if he invented it on the spot as “perfectly true.” His mind was so quick he grasped the stage setting of a dinner-party at once, and forthwith adapted his drama of the moment to exactly suit his audience. After a lapse of nearly twenty years “Iolanthe” was revived at the Savoy. Not one line or one word of the original text had been altered. “Pinafore,” when it was revived for the second time, just twenty-one years after its first performance, ran for months. How few authors’ work will stand such a test of excellence, yet Gilbert penned a dozen light operas. The genesis of “Iolanthe” is referable, like many of Gilbert’s libretti, to one of the _Bab Ballads_. The “primordial atomic globule” from which it traces its descent is a ballad called “The Fairy Curate.” It is a well-known fact that almost every comedian wishes to be a tragedian, and _vice versa_—look at Irving and Beerbohm Tree—and Gilbert had a great and mighty sorrow all his life. He wanted to write serious dramas, long five-act plays full of situations and thought; but no, fate ordained otherwise, when having for a change started his little bark as a librettist he had to persevere in penning what he called “nonsense.” The public were right; they knew there was no other W. S. Gilbert, they wanted to be amused. Some say the art of comedy-writing is dying out, and certainly no second Gilbert seems to be rising among the younger men, no humorist who can call tears or laughter at will, and can send his audience away happy every night. The world owes a debt of gratitude to this gifted scribe, for he never put an unclean line upon the stage and yet provoked peals of laughter while slyly giving his little digs at existing evils. His style has created a name of its own; to be Gilbertian is all that is smart, brilliant, caustic, and clean.