In the following year his prose romance "Aylwin" attained immediate success and ran through many editions in the course of a few months. The late 19th-century English novelist George Gissing noted in his diary in November 1898 that the novel had been "extravagantly praised", but that Gissing thought it showed a "dull mechanism". Both "The Coming of Love" and "Aylwin" set forth – the one in poetry, the other in prose – the romantic and passionate associations of Romany life, and maintain the traditions of George Borrow, whom Watts-Dunton had known well in his own youth.