"He has written a very clever and very interesting criticism," Mr. Merrill
replied. "I had to edit it somewhat, because he was inclined to be
Hugoesque and melodramatic in describing the action with very short
sentences. But I am very much pleased, indeed."

That was the beginning of Bob's career as a dramatic critic, a career in
which he gained authority and in which his literary faculties, his felicity
of expression and soundness of judgment found adequate scope.

In the following two or three years the cultivation of the field of
dramatic criticism occupied his time to the temporary exclusion of his
ambition for creative work. He and I read independently; but our tastes
had much in common, though his preference was for imaginative literature.
Meanwhile I was writing short stories with plenty of plot, some of which
found their way into various magazines; but his taste lay more in the line
of the French short story writers who made an incident the medium for
portraying a character. Historical romance had fascinations for me, but
Alphonse Daudet attracted both of us to the artistic possibilities that lay
in selecting the romance of real life for treatment in fiction as against
the crude and repellent naturalism of Zola and his school. This fact is not
a little significant in view of the turn toward historical romance
which exercised all the activities of Robert Neilson Stephens after the
production of his play, "An Enemy to the King," by E.H. Sothern.

Still our intimacy had prepared me for the change. Through many a long
night after working hours we had wandered through the moonlit streets until
daybreak exchanging views freely and sturdily on historical characters on
the philosophy of history, on the character of Henry of Navarre and his
followers, and on the worthies of Elizabethan England, in the literature of