the prototype in art of The Blessëd Damozel in literature, which, however, with all its merits of conception, intense earnestness, and simplicity, is certainly not the case the execution of the one being perfect and that of the other immature; the picture in question being of course The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. This interesting and impressive work was either finished in the Newman Street studio or in one in Red Lion Square, was exhibited in 1849 in the Free Exhibition held in the Portland Gallery, and was the second remunerative piece of work he had accomplished, the painting having found a purchaser at £80 in the person of the Marchioness of Bath, who afterwards gave it to the present owner, her daughter, Lady Louisa Feilding. Before this satisfactory event, however, Rossetti had made an acquaintance that was to ripen into the friendship of a lifetime. The young painterpoet came across some magazine verses, which he much admired, especially a ballad called Rosabel, and on the impulse at once wrote to the author, Mr. William Bell Scott. In writing, he also enclosed several short poems as specimens of his own poetic calibre, chief amongst the few being My Sister's Sleep and The Blessed Damozel; and the letter, dated 25th November 1847 and signed "Gabriel Charles Rossetti," was full of enthusiastic feeling and a very characteristic naïveté in personal matters, and moreover contained one or two unusual or self-coined words, "dignitous" especially I remember. Mr. Scott has told me what he thought of the letter with the unknown signature when it reached him in Newcastle, where he was then residing, and how thoroughly surprised he was at its poetic contents-apparently the work of an Italian youth, and work, moreover, as individual as it was fine, for it must be remembered that the medieval movement, which in literature may be said to have commenced in earnest with the publication of the Oxford and Cambridge magazine in 1856, had then scarce received its first impulse, and that consequently such work as The Blessed Damozel was doubly remarkable. In a word, it proves conclusively-as it did at the time to Mr. Scott that the author was a man of original and powerful genius. Some months subsequent to the receipt of this letter Mr. W. B. Scott visited the studio in London, where the two young painters, Rossetti and Holman Hunt, were working at their first pictures, respectively The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and the Oath of Rienzi; and again he recognised the fact that a youth of genius was maturing for good work, and now in art, for despite certain technical drawbacks and unattractive colouring at the stage in which Mr. Scott saw The Girlhood of Mary he speedily recognised its intellectual earnestness and spiritual fervour. About this time Rossetti paid his first visit to the Continent, having for company a fellow-student; the trip, which was the outcome of the sale of his first picture, was, however, limited in duration and distance, consisting mainly of a visit to two or three old towns in Belgium. A poem called The Carillon, which will be quoted in Chapter V., is especially interesting as a record of this short tour that was confined to visiting Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent; and even the direct mention in that poem of the Flemish painters Memmeling and Van Eyck does not express how deeply the young English artist appreciated their truthfulness and rich colour effects. I remember Rossetti's having said he saw nothing when abroad, meaning thereby that his attention was given wholly to the works of these painters whose influence undoubtedly affected his early work, and to the exclusion of all sight-seeing, pictorial and otherwise. When at Bruges he heard the carillon of the famous bells while he was standing rapt in admiration of the technical mastership of the Flemish painters' productions, and this he has recorded in the fifth verse of the crudely-expressed but very individual poem already mentioned, and to be found only in the rare magazine The Germ : "John Memmeling and John Van Eyck It set me closer unto them." According to a sketch by Mr. Eyre Crowe, dated about this time, Rossetti must have had anything but a robust appearance, being very thin and even somewhat haggard in expression. He went about in a long swallow-tailed coat of what was even in 1848 an antique pattern. That his appearance in his twentieth and some subsequent years was that of an ascetic I have been told by several, including himself, and in addition to such pen-and-ink sketches as the above, and of himself sitting to his Miss Siddall (his future wife) for his portrait, there are the perhaps more reliable portraitures in Mr. Millais' Isabella (painted in 1849), and Mr. Deverell's Viola.1 On 1 In the first of these (which has been engraved recently in the Art Journal), Rossetti is the farthest on the right hand at the table, and in the second he is the Jester "singing an antique song," while Viola herself was modelled from Miss Siddall. the other hand, a beautifully-executed pencil head of himself in boyhood shows him much removed from the ascetic type of later years, not unlike and strongly suggestive of a young Keats or Chatterton; while in maturer age he carefully drew his portrait from his mirrored image, the result being a highly-finished pen-and-ink likeness. While speaking of portraits I may state that Rossetti was twice photographed, once in Newcastle (which is the one publicly known, and upon which all other illustrations have been based), and once standing arm-in-arm with Mr. Ruskin, the latter being the best likeness of the poet-artist as he was quarter of a century ago. There is also an etching by Mr. Menpes, which, however, is only founded on the well-known photograph; and finally, there is a portrait taken shortly after death by Mr. Frederick Shields.1 Either shortly before or shortly after the Belgium trip Rossetti composed the beautiful story called Hand and Soul, a fitting companion in its maturity of style and thought to The Blessed Damozel. Portions of this are specially interesting from an autobiographical point of view, the passages in question having a direct bearing upon the artistic views of the author; but I will not here refer to it further, as it will be fully dealt with in the fourth chapter of this book, beyond stating that it excels anything of the kind in our language, or is at any rate only equalled in style by Mr. Walter Pater's exquisite "narrative," The Child in the House. It was not long after the composition of Hand and Soul that a meeting was 1 There was a cast of his face taken after death, but it is alike misleading and unpleasant. held in the studio at No. 83 Newman Street, the outcome of which was an organised body called the Preraphaelites, and the organ thereof styled The Germ. So much has been said for and against the Preraphaelite movement, it has incurred so much enmity and misrepresentation, and moreover as all facts concerning its origin are becoming somewhat vague and confused, I have devoted the following chapter to the consideration of it and The Germ; but I may here just mention that the movement was essentially a protest, and not merely the more or less earnest vagary of some enthusiastic young painters, and that Rossetti was essentially the animating or guiding member as well as original founder. To the Preraphaelite Brotherhood-the mysterious P. R. B.-neither Mr. W. Bell Scott nor Mr. Madox Brown belonged, as has sometimes been stated, both declining actual membership for the similar reason of disbelief in the suitability of cliques, and in this they were undoubtedly right, only being mistaken in not recognising the difference between a temporary organised union and a literary or artistic clique devoted to mutual admiration and general animadversion. Such cliques are the bane of all true change and advance in art, and still more in literature, and though it is true they have but their little day and are soon forgotten, save in semi-scornful reminiscence, they yet retard for a time the progress of better work than can be achieved by their own members, and only too frequently wound where they cannot kill. No one recognised this fact more than Rossetti himself, and he was ever wont to advise any young artist or writer to avoid joining or having anything to do with the mutual-admiration cliques that с |