years later, in 1857. At Dr. Anster's house he met with a fellow-contributor and congenial spirit, the brilliant university Bohemian, Charles Pelham Mulvany [q. v.]
In 1862, after several years of very desultory occupation, or, as he styled it, ‘daisy-picking’ in Ireland, Wills settled in London. He took rooms with his friend Henry Humphreys in Clifford's Inn. His efforts to make a livelihood by his pen were not encouraging. In 1863 appeared his ‘Notice to Quit,’ a story conceived after the manner of Eugène Sue, which was praised for its dramatic situations but met with little success. In October of this same year Wills obtained the Royal Humane Society's medal for a brave attempt to rescue a drowning lad near Old Swan Wharf. ‘The Wife's Evidence’ (1864, reissued 1876), a story of considerable melodramatic power, gained him an introduction to the magazines, and he wrote ‘David Chantrey’ (1865) for ‘Temple Bar,’ and for ‘Tinsley's Magazine’ ‘The Three Watches’ (1865), and ‘The Love that Wills’ (1867), in which he remanipulates material already used in ‘Old Times.’
His father's death in 1868 impelled Wills to undertake the support of his mother. He reverted to portraiture as his best means of earning money, took a studio at 15 The Avenue, Fulham Road, and worked very successfully in pastel drawings, mainly of children. He exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery, and was soon asking twenty guineas for a small picture finished in three or four sittings; and for a time there was no lack of fashionable sitters. Incurably unconventional, Wills, in response to a command to visit Osborne to draw the royal grandchildren, pleaded a prior engagement. The Princess Louise was interested in Wills's methods and amused by his Bohemian ways, but other patrons were repelled by the filth of his studio, which was haunted by stray cats, by monkeys and other unclean animals, and also by numerous parasites and loafers, attracted by the painter's easy-going habit of inviting visitors to stay, and keeping his spare change in a tobacco jar on the chimney-piece. Absent-mindedness, inherited, it is said, from his father, who once boiled his watch in mistake for an egg, grew upon Wills to an extent which prejudiced his career. He became oblivious of social engagements, asked people with the utmost cordiality to meet him at dinner and then could not be found to receive them, forgot or travestied the names of people who entertained him, and prided himself in being as dispassionate as Dr. Johnson on the subject of clean linen. In his later years he did most of his composition in bed.
Meanwhile Wills was turning his attention to writing for the stage. A first dramatic attempt, an adaptation from the German of Van Holtei, entitled ‘A Man and his Shadow’ (1865), was followed by the pathetic ‘Man o' Airlie,’ which was put on at the Princess's in July 1867, with Mr. Hermann Vezin in the title-part. Though the receipts were small, the play rarely failed to move its audience, and the author was encouraged to write two other plays, suggested and produced by Mr. Vezin: ‘Hinko, or the Headsman's Daughter’ (founded upon Ludwig Storch's historical novel), produced at the Queen's Theatre in September 1871; and ‘Broken Spells,’ written in conjunction with Westland Marston, and produced at the Court in April 1872. A short time before this date Wills was introduced by Vezin to the Batemans, and after the appearance of ‘Hinko’ he was retained by Colonel Bateman as ‘dramatist to the Lyceum’ at a yearly salary of 300l. Upon this endowment he produced in turn ‘Medea in Corinth’ (July 1872), ‘Charles I’ (28 Sept. 1872), and ‘Eugene Aram’ (April 1873). The first two of these plays contain Wills's best work. ‘Charles I,’ though inferior to its predecessor in form, caught the taste of the public, and enabled Mr. (Sir) Henry Irving to confirm the reputation which he had made for himself in the ‘Bells.’ The portraiture of Charles was in harmony with Van Dyck, and the suggestion of calm and dignified suffering that disdained to resent or protest is decidedly effective. Like Scott, Wills was a staunch cavalier, and he was as little concerned with historical accuracy as Dumas.
In his next historical play, ‘Marie Stuart’ (Princess's, February 1874), he caricatured John Knox with the same gusto with which he had defamed Cromwell. He was now in great demand as a verse playwright, and produced in quick succession ‘Sappho,’ given at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, in 1875; ‘Buckingham’ (Olympic, November 1875); ‘Jane Shore’ (Princess's, September 1876); and ‘England in the Days of Charles II’ (Drury Lane, September 1877). His second great success was with ‘Olivia’ (based upon Goldsmith's ‘Vicar of Wakefield’), of which the best that can be said is that it has rarely been surpassed as an adaptation of a novel. It was produced at the Court Theatre in March 1873 under the management of John Hare, with William Terriss [q. v.] as Squire Thornhill and Miss Ellen Terry as Livy; both players were seen in their original parts
