It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction.

He contributed to The Yellow Book and associated with the Rhymers' Club. The book My Ladies' Sonnets appeared in 1887 and in 1889 be became for a brief time literary secretary to Wilson Barrett. He has been credited with the 1906 translation from the Danish of Peter Nansen's Love's Trilogy; but most sources and the book itself attribute it to Julie.

The American actress Eva Le Gallienne (1899–1991) was his daughter by his second marriage.