heart that so recently ceased to beat. It is true indeed that he was not always quite equal to himself, for the fatal effects of a constant use of a dangerous drug and the irritation of a ruined constitution frequently made him say unjust words that rose as it were on the surface and not from the depths and on such occasions he was afterwards more grieved than any one concerned, and more than ordinary allowance should be made for any one who suffers from this well-known effect of chloral. Another thing must be taken into consideration, namely, the irresistibly imaginative groove in which his thoughts moved and which made it often difficult for him to resist the temptation of exaggeration in recounting any personal narrative and in praise or denunciation. He offended many by this recklessness, but those who really knew him overlooked these minor inconsistencies and forgave much where they gained much more. The time has not yet come to write a really complete biography of Dante Rossetti, but it is much to be hoped that in the course of a few years, when time has somewhat more adequately adjusted the too diverse lights of the present into an exact focus, the friend who knew him best of recent years, and whom Rossetti himself wished to undertake the task, Mr. Theodore Watts, should write the comprehensive and permanent account of the eventful forty years of the man whose genius is so undoubtedly great, and whose influence in two directions has been so marked.

From the latter part of 1872 to 1874 Rossetti was almost wholly at Kelmscott Manor, a fine old house of the time of Elizabeth, on the banks of the

Thames. Here he spent some of the happiest years of his life, devoting himself to painting and to the study, though not the production, of poetry, seeing only Mr. Watts constantly, and a very few friends,— his mother and sister, Mr. Madox Brown, Mr. Morris, Mr. Scott, Dr. and Mr. George Hake (the latter having lived with him for a time as friend and secretary), occasionally Mr. F. R. Leyland and Mr. Howell, and perhaps one or two others. Besides producing such pictures as Proserpine and others of his finest threequarter lengths, he may be said to have gone through an entire course of reading. He was extremely fond at this time of reading aloud, and I have heard Mr. Watts say that Rossetti, while at Kelmscott, read out to him during the long winter evenings at various times many of the novels of Alexandre Dumas and nearly the whole of Shakespeare. It was now indeed that he made that thorough study of the text of Shakespeare for which he was afterwards remarkable. His health too at this period may, for him, for a considerable time be said to have been perfect, and he used to take long walks by the river,-one reminiscence of which will be found in the verses called Down Stream, in the reissued Poems of 1882. From 1874 onward till the autumn of 1880 he remained exclusively at 16 Cheyne Walk, seeing few friends as visitors and still fewer as regular comers, amongst the latter (if I am not forgetting) being only Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, Mr. Scott, Mr. Treffry Dunn, Mr. Leyland, Mr. P. B. Marston, Mr. Hall Caine, and myself.

While still in the prime of life the energies of the body slowly weakened, and at last in the autumn of 1881

Rossetti went with Mr. Hall Caine, a gentleman who from the summer of 1881 onward generously devoted the greater part of his time to residence with and care of the poet-painter, to the Vale of St. John, in Cumberland. He returned, however, little if at all the better for the change and had soon to spend the greater part of each day in bed, a partial paralysis of the left arm causing him great anxiety and trouble. As the weeks went past the few friends who had access to him were sometimes hopeful, sometimes the reverse, but none anticipated the rapidly approaching end, for in the first place the sufferer had originally had an iron constitution, and in the next his illness was at no time apparently so severe as in 1872. In January or early in February, and on medical advice, he took advantage of a kind offer of Mr. Seddon, who volunteered the loan of Westcliffe Bungalow at Birchington-on-Sea, and here Rossetti and Mr. Caine removed, followed in a short time by Mrs. Rossetti senior and Miss Christina Rossetti. Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, Mr. F. R. Leyland, myself, and one or two others visited him regularly from this date till Easter drew near. When I last saw him, exactly a week before his death, I had little idea it was for the last time; indeed, he seemed to me to be slowly but surely recovering, and laughed and talked with his old heartiHe had greatly enjoyed the recent writing of an amusing ballad, and had just composed two fine sonnets on the well-known design of the Sphinx, called The Question (composed in 1875), and was moreover full of plans for future work; his tone of mind altogether being very different from the melancholy and depression that had been with him constantly for many months.

ness.

D

Six days later he was to recognise that these plans would never be fulfilled, and that he himself was about to obtain the answer to that question which his design represented as unanswerable in life. On Good Friday it became certain that he was nearing his end, and though on Saturday he did not seem worse he realised the truth himself, stating that he had no wish to live longer as the period of really good work had quite or nearly reached its close. On Sunday he was again more hopeful, the instinctive clinging to life and instinctive creative faculty alike urging him to wish for prolongation of his years. But it was not to be. Between nine and ten on Sunday night he gave two short sharp cries, and about a quarter of an hour later died quietly and without pain. At the last his brother and mother and sister were with him, as also Mr. Theodore Watts, Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. Shields, and the local physician, Dr. Harris.

Thus at the early age of fifty-three passed away a painter such as English art had not hitherto known, a poet that in contemporary literature takes his place in the front rank. In the ensuing pages I shall endeavour to trace out his work and influence in both creative fields, and here I will only remark that his death brings home to us more decisively than before that in Dante Gabriel Rossetti we had a writer and an artist whose name will surely sound in the ears of posterity as now sound in ours the names of William Mallord Turner in art and possibly Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats in literature. Great in two great arts, he will be regarded by future generations in a way that is impossible now and until all prejudices silt away like loose sand in an oncoming

tide, until truth asserts itself and party passions have passed away like mists before the morning. An ardent and appreciative critic, he seldom failed to select the peculiar excellences of any poem by a contemporary writer he might be reading, irrespective of the author's celebrity or insignificance; and it was the same in art, the mention at any time of such names as Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir Noel Paton, Millais, Holman Hunt, Frederick Shields, Ford Madox Brown, W. B. Scott, the late Samuel Palmer, Frederick Sandys, and others, being at once resultant in trenchant and generous remarks. In poetry he held Tennyson to be the greatest poet of the period, and he was gratified as if by a personal pleasure when Mr. Theodore Watts, also an ardent believer in Tennyson, wrote his fine sonnet to the Laureate, with the inscription "On his publishing in his seventy-first year the most richly-various volume of English verse that has appeared in his own century." He appreciated to a generous extent the poetry of present younger writers, but failed to see in nine-tenths of it any of that originality and individual aura that characterise work that will stand the stress of time; but of the poems of Mr. Philip Bourke Marston he spoke ever in the highest terms, regarding him as undoubtedly the most gifted of all the younger men. I have heard him declare Mr. Marston's early poem called A Christmas Vigil, written in the author's twentieth year and under the terrible disadvantage of blindness, to be more memorable than any of his own early productions, and many of his friends may recollect the generous pleasure he used to take in reciting some of the Garden Secrets which have been so widely appreciated in America as well as in England. Amongst men of