his time between there and his country estate, first at Elvington, near Dover, and then at Compton, near Guildford, where he built a house, Wancote. 1890s and last years Throughout the 1880s, Sir Arthur Sullivan chafed at the restrictions of the comic operas for which he was famous. His friends and associates, and even the queen, encouraged him to write a serious opera. His usual collaborator, W.S. Gilbert, declined to join him in writing a full-scale romantic opera, and recommended Sturgis as "the best serious librettist of the day". The opera, Ivanhoe (1891), is an adaptation of Walter Scott's long patriotic novel of the same title. Most critics praised the libretto. Bernard Shaw was an exception, accusing Sturgis of "wanton debasement of a literary masterpiece", turning "Scott's noble dialogue" into "fustian". The Times praised Sturgis's "remarkable fidelity and skill". The Observer also found his work skilful. The Manchester Guardian said that Sullivan was fortunate in his librettist, who "show[ed] himself capable of depicting ideas and events in a few words, and those words replete with rhythmical vigour and poetic beauty as well as significance of meaning." Sullivan's friend the critic Herman Klein called the libretto "a skilful and fairly dramatic adaptation of Scott's novel and a polished example of poetic lyric-writing". Although the opera was a success, initially running for an unprecedented 155 performances at Richard D'Oyly Carte's new Royal English Opera House, it passed into obscurity after the opera house failed. It was, Klein observed, "the strangest comingling of success and failure ever chronicled in the history of British lyric enterprise!" The only novel published by Sturgis in the 1890s was The Folly of Pen Harrington (1897). He also essayed a sustained piece of verse in Count Julian: a Spanish Tragedy (1893), which he followed with A Book of Song (1894). Among his poems, three were set to music by Hubert Parry, an old friend from Eton days: "Sleep" ("Beautiful up from the deeps of the solemn sea"), "Through the ivory gate" ("I had a dream last night"), and "Whence". In 1901, Sturgis wrote the libretto for Charles Villiers Stanford's opera, "Much Ado About Nothing", based on the play by Shakespeare. Sturgis's text was exceptionally faithful to Shakespeare's original. The Manchester Guardian commented, "Not even in the Falstaff of Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Verdi have the characteristic charm, the ripe and pungent individuality of the original comedy been more