UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES <^y DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AS DESIGNER AND WRITER. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 1863 FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LEWIS CARROLL DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTl ^ AS DESIGNER AND WRITER. NOTES BY WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTl, INCLUDING A PROSE PARAPHRASE OF THE HOUSE OF LIFE. As thoKf/h mine image in the glass Should tarry when myself am gone. CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited LONJ)ON, PARIS, NEW YORE # MELBOURNE. 1889. [alt. eight.s resekved. 1 • •- * 3 « « • • * • PREFACE. Theee would not under any circumstances be any great occasion for saying- much by way of Preface to this book, and the occasion becomes all the less through my having put a few introductory remarks to the several sections of the work. The reader will readily perceive that the life-work of Dante Rossetti is here considered in two branches : — (1) his Paintings and Do- s\gns, to which the Tabular List of Works of Art serves as an Appendix ; and (2) his Writings, supplemented by an Index of Writings, and also by the prose paraphrase of TAe House of Life. Mine is a book of memoranda and of details ; perhaps some readers will prefer to say, "of shreds and patches/^ The materials were authori- tative and mostly in my own hands, and it may fairly be averred that no one else can have at his command, at the present time, any the like quantity of materials out of which a similar book could be constructed. Such being the case, I have thought it well to turn to account, in the interest of my brother's memory, the matter which lay under my control. As to the use made of it, I will only add that I view with some regret the very frequent mention of prices charged and paid ; for the works themselves, and their intellectual, artistic, or personal associations, interest me more than any question of prices, and I should like to consult the taste of readers who regard the affair in the same light : X DAXTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. but a professional man acts professionally, and prices are not unnaturally debated or recorded in liis corre- spondence, and I reproduce such details as I find, whether on this or on other topics. Thoui^h the present is the only volume which I have yet issued regarding my brother, there are some other minor performances of mine relating- to him which it may be excusable here to specify. Since his death in 188;i I have compiled (1883) the Catalogue of his Re- maining JFor/cs sold at Christie''s, and have written (188i) three articles in the Arf Journal named Notes on Rossetti and his Works; the Preface and Notes (1886) to the edition of his Collected Works; and three articles (1888 and 1889) in the Magazine of Art on Portraits of Rossetti. Several details which appear in these various writings might naturally, if not already published there, have found a place in the present volume. It seems more incumbent upon me to advert to what I have not done in this book than to what I have done. I have not attempted to write a biographical account of my brother, nor to estimate the range or value of his powers and performances in fine art and in literature. I a-ain further on. This gentleman wanted to have a Blessed Damozel done (no doubt as a watercolour) for £63 ; Kossetti, however, was inclined to stick to Si . Cecilia for £42 — the subject of the death of St. Cecilia which forms one of the Tennvson wood-designs. As to this wood-block he had been earnest in impressing on the engraver that '^ none of the work is to be left out.'' On Christmas Day he was preparing to exhibit certain works in a small collection got up in the then Hogarth Club, to which he and some of his closest i friends belonged. He proposed to send '' Lady Tre- velyan's drawing " (I am not certain which this is), '' the Llandaft' sketches," and, along with these, David PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 31 .Be.v, a sej)arate version of the third compartment^ but this last would not be readj for a fortnight or so. 1857. In this year Rossetti painted a small oil-picture of St. Katharine for Mr. Ruskin ; it represented an ex- ceedingly mediaeval artist painting from a lady who poses with a wheel as St. Katharine, and it was exhi- bited at the Burlington Club, in the collection of Ros- setti^s works got together there in 1883. The catalogue described it as " the only oil-picture painted between 1853 and 1858/^ which is, I presume, nearly correct. Two or three of Mr. Ruskin^s letters relate to this work. In one note he expresses a wish to see the St. Katharine as soon as done, adding that he will pay cash for it, and that old debts may stand over ; the " old debts " being seemingly arrears of work for which xnj brother had already received payment. In another note he ob- jects to an alteration that had been made in the picture, which, unless altered back, he would resign. In yet another he pronounces the St. Katharine "an absurdity,^^ without defining why. It is no doubt a quaint in- vention, not without a twinkle of humour in the treat- ment, and the costume of the fifteenth- century artist is probably not such a working-garb as the man would really have assumed to paint in. Mr. Ruskin admired at this time The Magdalene, a term which must desis"- nate the subject of The Magdalene at the Boor of Simon the Pharisee, and he would willingly have re- signed for that work the "oil-picture \_St. Katharine'] at 50 guineas.-'-' In other letters INIr. Ruskin expresses him- self willing to subscribe to a reredos, and a flower-boi'der for it — evidently pointing to the reredos or triptych- 3-2 DANTE GABRIEL EOSSETTL picture for Llandaff Catliedral ; and be speaks dis- paraging'ly of a drawing with some male heads. I don^t know which drawing- this was, nor whether the censure was just ; but it em^jhasizes the fact that, from an early date in llossetti^s painting, his predilection and bis mastery were in female heads, those of men being rather wanting in energy and variety of virile type. Ruskin also proposed to exhibit at a lecture in Oxford "the Beatrice" and the Paolo and Francesca. It was in 1857 that my brother undertook to paint a series of Arthurian pictures in the Hall of the Union Club in Oxford. He must have known something of Mr. Burne Jones, then an Oxford student, in 1856, or possibly 1855; that g-entleraan having sought him out, and asked his opinion as to some of his romantic pen-and-ink designs, very remarkable in promise and originality of suggestion. Through Mr. Jones, Ros- setti came to know Mr. William Morris, and afterwards Mr. Algernon Swinburne, also Oxford students. Tbe decoration-project for the Union Hall was, however, under- taken apart from these acquaintances, and also apart from any direct influence of Mr. Ruskin. It was con- certed at the outset of the Long Vacation between Rossetti and Mr. Benjamin Woodward, the architect employed both for the Union Hall and for the Oxford Museum ; an Irishman of the most genuine artistic gifts and sympathies, and of a character singularly prepossessing in its retiring modesty. Morris at once tendered his co-operation. Rossetti gave his work gratis, the funds of the Union not admitting, pre- sumably, of any other arrangement; but his materials were i)aid for, and he lived at free quarters in Oxford. Mr. Burne Jones was soon associated with him as PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 33 painter of some o£ the subjects ; also Mr. Hungerford Pollen, of Oxford, Mr. Spencer Stanhope, Mr. Arthur Hughes, a choice painter and early friend, and Mr. Val Prinsep, a friend of more recent date. These, along- with Alexander Munro for sculptural work, were al'. Not any one of them was conversant with the processes of solid and permanent wall-painting. The works were executed, I understood, in a sort of watercolour dk- temper, and were from the beginning predestined, by Fate and Climate, to ruin. My brother allotted to himself two large spaces on the walls; painted oue subject more or less completely. Sir Launcelot at the Shrine of the Sangrael, and began or schemed out the other, Sir Galahad receiving the Sangrael. In October 1857 I was minded to go to Oxford, and see what was doing; but my brother, on the 3Uth of the month, wrote to me that things were then " in a muddle," and advised me to wait awhile, which I did. The scheme was in active operation in 1857, stagnated in 1858, and was partially revived, and soon afterwards finally dropped, in 1859. 1858. A letter from jSIr. Ruskin, which may perhaps be- long to this year, informs Rossetti that he need not worry about money which he owed to the writer (rather maybe about work which he owed in return for money paid), but recommends him to attend to commissions given by other persons, and to the one for Llandaff Cathedral. He offers to remit £73 of the debt, provided Rossetti will do another side of the painting-work for the Union Hall, but stipulates that the objects therein must be properly represented — a 3i DANTE GABRIEL R08SETTL clause w'liicli sui^gests that Ruskin reg-arded some of the objeet-paintuig ah-eady done m the Hall as de- ])arting' not a little from the rigid accuracy of the Praeraphaelite dogma. On the last day of this year llossetti was expecting to receive in a fortnight some money from the authorities in Llandaff. He was en- grossed with a picture — which I should presume to be one section of this same Llandaff commission — and was eao-er to o'et it finished. This however was not to be accomplished for some time yet to come^ so far as the entire triptych is concerned. The price paid for the triptych may prolmbly have been £400. A letter of llossetti^'s is extant saying that he had named £400 as the figure for the three compartments^ and £^00 for the central one singly. At the time he regarded these sums as " impracticable " ; but he was not likely to take lessj and may possibly even have received somewhat more. As we have seen, ^Ir. Thomas Seddon, the painter, had been instrumental in procuring- this com- mission for Rossetti ; his brother, Mr. John P. Seddon, beina" one of the firm of architects charged with the restoration and the general oversight of Llandaff Ca- thedral, was also much concerned in all details connected with the triptych, and did everything which friendly and intelligent zeal could do to smooth the painter's path in the aff'air. This may be a convenient place for saying some- thing more definite about the Llandaff triptych, one of the largest pictures which my brother produced, and (apart from easel-pictures, some minor church-decora- tions, and tlie now totally faded distemper-work in Oxford) the only one which occupies a permanent posi- tion in a public building. Ihe central compartment PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 35 has sometimes (as for instance in the Royal Academy catalogue of 1883) been termed T/ie Adoration of the Magi; but this is a decided misnomer, and rediices to practical commonplace and insignificance the pur- port of the entire work. The central compartment re- presents in fact the Infant Christ adored by a King and a Shepherd ; and, taken in connexion with the side-pictui'es, it indicates the spiritual equality and communion of all conditions of men in the eye of God. The side-pictures show respectively David as a Shepherd about to confront Goliath, and David as a King harp- ing to the Lord. This is substantially another form, or another exemplification, of the same idea — the shepherd and the king being here not only equal in service to the Most High, but actually one and the same man. I venture to say that the triptych, thus understood — and its message is plainly enough conveyed — is something very different from being a three-hundredth version of that hack-subject of mediaeval and renaissance painters Tlte Adoration of the Magi. 1859. It was in or about this year that my brother made the personal acquaintance of an actress whom he greatly admired for beauty of face and person^ and whose pro- fessional talents he also appreciated, though less warmly ; her stage-name was Miss Herbert. A letter from Mr. Ruskin expresses a hope that he would soon paint Miss Herbert^s head in his picture ; the Llandaff triptych is probably meant. Another letter from the friendly but unsparing critic warns Rossetti that, in one of his works, his careless use of pigment has caused a lady in blue to change colour. D I 36 DANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTI. In February Mr. PHnt bouo^ht two pen-and-ink drawings — a Hamlet \_Hamlef and Ophelia, I suppose] for £42, and a Guenevere [perhaps Launcelot escaping from Gtienevere's ChamJjer'] for £31 ; '^a certain yellow lady " was expected to be returned in exchange for the latter. My brother also joined together into one whole a separate head and a separate landscape, upon which Flint looked with favour. In June Rossetti painted in a yvQek an entire picture upon one of the doors in the house of Mr. William Morris — the Red House, Upton, Bexley Heath. This was, I think, one of the two allied subjects, Dante meeting Beatrice in a Florentine street, and in the Garden of Eden. In November my brother was setting to work on the centre-piece of the Llandaff triptych. Mr. Leathart, of Newcastle-on-Tyne (now of Gateshead, close to New- castle), had by this time become one of my brother^s purchasers ; he continued for some years a steady buyer, and was always a valued friend, and one on whose natural judgment in works of art, more especially as resrards a true colour-sense, Rossetti laid considerable stress. Mr. Leathart was by this time the owner of the high-pitched water-colour named A C7/r/st?uas Carol, and of the recently executed water-colour of Sir Galahad, being the same design which is engraved in the illus- trated Tennyson j and he had commissioned the oil- pictm'e Found for £367. The commission given origin- ally by Mr. McCracken for this last-named work had collapsed, perhaps as far back as 18,55. My brother had also lately painted a head for Mr. Boyce. This was, I have no doubt, the one entitled Bocca Baciata, in which the marigold-flower figures conspicuously. He hardly painted anything in a more delicate and even style of PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 37 art than that. When one comes to the date of Bocca Baclafa, one may fairly say that Rossetti was in his prime, and had well emerged from the tentative or ex- perimental stage, being then in his thirty-second year. 1860 may, I think, be the date of a letter from Mr. Coventry Patmore referring to my brother's watercolour of Lucre- zia Borgia, in which the princess is represented washing her hands after concocting a poison-draught ; her father the Pope, and with him the destined victim of the plot, are seen by reflection in a mirror. The victim is Lucrezia's own husband, the Duke of Bisceglia ; he is propped on crutches, and the scene is his sick-chamber. In the spring of this year my brother, after a long engagement, protracted partly by the always delicate and often perilous condition of her health, married Miss Siddal, and settled down with her in the chambers, considerably enlarged for the occasion, which he had occupied for several years at No. 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge. One small thing which he did about this time was to collect together, into a handsome and solid scrapbook presented to him by a lady friend, a number of the pencil-drawings and sketches which had accumulated on his hands within the last few years. He continued adding to this collection from time to time, and every now and then he sold some of the items. A large number of them, extracted from the scrapbook and mounted singly, remained up to the day of his death, and were disposed of, among other works of his, at the auction-sale at Christie's in jNIay 1883. I find a letter from Mr. Buskin dated in Seji- tember 1860, saying that he had been looking over my lv3225 38 DANTE GABBIEL BOSSETTI. brother^s book of sketches^ and particularly liked those of his wife, which were numerous, and marked by a peculiar cachet of delicacy and grace. Somewhere about the same time one of his principal purchasers of recent years — Mr. Pliut — died very sud- denl}'. This gentleman was a stockbroker of Leeds, a very worthy man, and a leader in a local dissenting" body, and was not a little interested in the new movement in art in which my brother took a principal share. He also bought works from Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, and others. The death of Mr. Flint was severely felt by Rossetti. In him he lost a man whom personally he esteemed and liked ; and the event threw his affairs into some considerable confusion at this early stage of married life, as Flint had advanced sums of money for three works not completed, or perhaps hardly begun ; and the pressure from executors and their agents was equally inopportune and harassing. The total amount was £714. A letter from my brother dated 39th September refers to this matter. He speaks also of an offer made by Mr. Gambart the picture-dealer — £52 for '^ the head,^^ which he liked less than another head (possibly the Bocca Baciata) painted for Mr. Boyce ; mentions a pen-and-ink Hamlet, due to Colonel Gillum for £50 ; and suggests whether the pen-and-ink Cassanrlra, nearly completed, might not be substituted for that, and might not be priced at £60. AYere Gillum to take the Cas- sandra, the beginning of ''the Dante series ^^ in water- colour for him might be deferred till the ensuing quarter. Colonel Gillum (now well known in the world of philanthropy) was then a somewhat recent acquaint- ance of my brother, and a tolerably steady purchaser. rATNTINGS AND DESIGNS. 39 1861. A note of Januaiy 1 2 records : " Yesterday I sold for £35 a coloured sketch which had taken me about half an hour. T/ud paid.'^ It may have been towards the same time that Rossetti painted his wife as T//e Queen of Hearts, ov Retina Cordium,2i small oil-picture. This seems to have been commissioned by some one — perhaps Mr. Miller — for in February 1802, very soon after ]Mrs. Rossetti^s death, it was about to be offered for sale in an auction, and was withdrawn by friendly intervention in deference to my brother's feeling-s. Being bound to complete Found for Mr. Leathart, and the Llandaff triptych due towards the end of August, and other work besides, Rossetti found it impracticable to devote himself exclusively to finishing the three pictures for the Flint estate. He completed in July the watercolour (for this estate) of Dr. Johnson at the Mitre Tavern, with tioo Methodist Ladies, and he proposed to deliver, instead of the oil-pictures, and before the time already stipulated, different works already in hand ; and finally some arrangement, either on this or some other basis, was agreed upon and carried out. A young artist named Wigand sat for the head of Boswell in the Dr. Johnson group. Towards the end of September, Rossetti sent off a picture painted for Captain Goss — I cannot define the subject. He had previously completed a large head named Fair Bosa- inund. The first published poetry by our sister Christina, Gohlin Market and, other Foems, came out in 1SG2. My brother designed its two illustrations, and also its binding. The principal drawing was cut on the wood 40 BANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTI. hy Mr. Morris with uncommon spirit — I believe his first attempt in that Hne, and pretty nearly his only one. 1862. My brother's brief term of married life came to a close in February of this year, when he suddenly found himself a widower. It is no part of my plan to deal with the events of his life, apart from such as concern his works in art and in literature. I therefore pass on at once to the next indication, which I find in September 186:2, reg'ardino^ his painting-s. Mr. Leathart had now undertaken to buy the triple watercolour of Paolo and Fraricesca, and he expressed a wish that the earlier watercolour of the same subject, once belong-ing- to Ruskin, should not be so altered as closely to resemble the version purchased by himself. Mariana (the Tennyson design as a watercolour) was also offered to him for c€50. He likewise mentioned a design of T/ie Crucifixion by Rossetti (where John is trying- to draw the Madoima away from the foot of the cross) as praised by Mr. AV. Bell Scott. Mr. Leathart asked Rossetti to paint a portrait of Mrs, Leathart, which by the end of the year was done — a small oil- picture. Mr. James Anderson Rose, the solicitor, who had known my brother well for about a couple of years, commissioned Joan of Arc kissing- the sword of deliver- ance — an oil-picture, of which one or two duplicates were afterwards painted. The original romainod, to my thinking, unrivalled. 1863 was a year replete with artistic activity on my brother's jiart. Tn cnie letter he asks for some photographs that PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 41 may serve to guide him " in painting- Troy at the back of my Helen." The Helen was, I believe, sold to Mr. Blaekmore (of the firm of solicitors, Duncan, Squarey, and Blackmore), at Hooton, Cheshire; it may now perhaj^s be in the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury. This was a small oil-painting- of the Grecian princess — ■ head and shoulders. I thouo^ht it then — and should probably still think it, Avere I to get sight of it again — a very choice specimen of my brother^s skill. Mr. George E,ae, of Birkenhead, the manager or managing-director of the North and South Wales Bank, and a great authority in his vocation, as proved by his book published towards 1885, now appears as a pur- chaser of Rossetti's works. Eventually he formed a very important collection of them, comparable with those be- longing to two purchasers of later date — Mr. Leyland and Mr. Graham. Mr. Rae^s first transaction with Rossetti occurred in 18G2 ; he then bought the Mariana (or Heart of the Nighty, which had been previously offered to Mr. Leathart, and a circular painting in oil of a female head. In June 1863 the painter wrote to enquire whether he might regard a double watercolour named The Salutation of Beatrice, already seen by Mr. E,ae, as commissioned by him for £310. This and all other letters from Rossetti to Rae have been liberally and spontaneously placed by the latter at my disj^osal, for the purpose of my present record. The answer returned was presumably in the affirmative. In Decem- ber Rossetti wrote again, mentioning two pictures, either of which might probably please Mr. Rae. One of these he had seen begun — the oil-picture named The Beloved. The other was Tri>' that the notion of colouring the frame could not be entertained. I infer, however^ that the picture was in fact never sent to London for re-working. In the September of one year or other, perhaps 18(39, my brother went to Llandaff, and there re-touched the ])icture, and " much improved ^^ (as he considered) "the centre-piece by lightening the Virgin and Child. ""^ Another work of restoration or completion was mooted in the autumn. Mr. Thursfield wrote enquir- ing whether Rossetti would like to finish his distemper- painting in the Hall of the Oxford Union, or whether plied. This work, it appears, had at one time belonged to ^Ir. AYilliam Tlraham, and was mentioned by him in 187."j as the only Rossetti he had ever parted with. At the beginning of the year Rossetti was minded to take up in earnest, as an oil-picture^ his design of PAIXTIXGS AXn DESIGXS. 77 Cassandra prophesyiug doom to Hector. He offered it to INIr. Lcyland for some large price, which (as the correspondence shows) must have exceeded £2100 : to this proposal Mr. Leyland did not assent, and he also resig-ned the idea of purchasing T/te Boicer-meadoiv. He commissioned, for j€sJO, the Veronica Veronese (the picture of a lady touching a violin in a note suggested by the lilt of a canary). An earlier commission for a similar price was La Via — the subject from Dante's Furgatorio, begun perhaps as far back as iSOS, and only finished towards 1880. La Pia %vas (as many of my readers will be aware) a Sienese lady, who was kept by her husband, through jealousy or some other motive of malignit}^, in the pestilential district of the Marcmma, and there detained until the climate killed her. In the picture she is represented seated languidly on the battlements of the castle, and fingering her fatal wedding-ring. A letter from Mr. McConnel, dated in May, shows that he was then the owner of the small oil-picture named Tivo Mothers, which is an offshoot from that very extensive composition after Browning, Uisl , -said Kate the Queen, which I have mentioned under the remote years 1819-50. The Two Mothers represents a mother and child before an image of the Madonna and the infant Jesus. It is painted on a small strip of the large canvas which had been destined for the Browning subject : and the head of the human mother is the very same head which, in the full composition, had Ijeen intended for a middle-aged lady of the court, reading to Queen Kate ns she sits having her hair combed out. In the same month of May Mr. Ilae wrote 78 DAXTE GABIIIEL llOSSETTI. observing- that he then possessed a larger number of Rossetti's works than any other purchaser. He enumer- ated them as follows (my readers must be asked to pardon the reiietition involved) : — Sifj^lla Falmifera, Monna Tanna, The Beloved, Venus Verfieorrlia, The Damsel of the Sangrael, Fazio's Mistress, The Tune of Seven Toivers, The Bine Closet, Mariana, The Chattel before the Lists, Sir Jirense sa//-s Bity, Baolo and Francesca, and The Wedding of St. George. This makes thirteen subjects altog'ether — presumably all that Mr. Rae then possessed. In June of this year my brother had a very serious illness^ which will be more particularly mentioned when I come to speak of his writing-s. It compelled him to retreat from London, and for a while to drop all professional occupation whatsoever. He resumed work towards the close of Aug-ust. At some time in this year, perhaps September, Mr. Valpy wrote to him asking him to do a crayon portrait of Mrs. Valpy, and observing that he had seen some of his works of the like kind at the house of Mr. Steven- sou in Tynemonth. At Trowan, in the Highlands of Scotland, Rossetti had already, towards the beginning of September, taken up (under urgent pressure from Mr. Madox Brown, who, with his usual warmth of friendshi]), had accompanied him out of Loudon) the replica of his Beata Beatrix for Mr. William Graham, abandoned in the previous year as hopeless. It was finished before he left Scotland. He spoke of this Beata Beatrix as having been completed " taut hien que mal, or plus malque bien." A later notice of this picture occurs in Jnnuary 1S73, when Rossetti varnished it, with most benehcial results in depth and transparency, and was able to jDronounce PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 79 " It looks iilmost toleraljle.""- There Avas still one draw- back : the painting had been glazed with a mixture of Roberson's and Parris's mediums^ and the varnishing produced here and there a sort o£ whitish soapy bloom. When finally the frame came in February^ and the picture could be viewed complete with its predella^ it was even dubbed '"quite satisfactory/^ and "up to his usual level/^ Rossetti regretted to learn that^ during his absence from London, his crayon drawing named Silence had been sold to Messrs. Heaton and Brayshay, of Bradford ; he intended to paint it one day (which however he never did), and resolved to get it back, and this he succeeded in doing soon afterwards. The purchasers rated it at ^8250. This drawing was resold, towards the end of 1S7(), to Mr. Councillor Rowley, of JNIan- chester. On leaving Scotland, Rossetti returned to Kelmscott, and there he remained settled up to the summer or early autumn of 1874<. He contemplated undertaking two pictures as soon as he should reach Kelmscott: (1) the subject named The JJaydfeam (or, in the first in- stance, Moiiiui Friinavera), which nevertheless was not seriously begun on the canvas till some years afterwards ; and (£) a full-length Pcj^^r/om, of small life-size; he con- sidered that this subject would benefit much by being treated in full length, and by some changes of detail. He had also an idea of painting the noble subject of the suicide of Ptetus and Arria, but of this no trace remains except a slight but expressive pencil-sketch. I ques- tion, moreover, whether he ever produced the full-length Pandora. He had by him, in the house in Cheyne Walk, heads both for the Pandora and for the Pa//- dream, and studies for the background of the latter were 80 DAXTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. then being made at Trowau by Mr. Dunn. For each of these pictures he meant to charge a price of £105n, and he thouo-ht of offerino- either of them to ]Mr. Leathart. Before the end of September he had received at Kelm- scott from Chelsea various drawings^ including- the two heads above-named, and a head of Mrs. Zambaco, a Greek lady of his acquaintance, now known as a sculp- tress or medallist. Soon afterwards Rossetti got back from Mr. Leyland the picture of Lllttli, with a view to makino: some alteration in it : he thought of refinishiug the head from a then very childish sitter, Miss May Morris, who (as he wrote) " has the right complexion.''^ He re-consigned this picture to Mr. Leyland in De- cember, and wrote to a friend : " I have made it, I think, a complete success, quite worthy to hang with the Fiddle-picture^^ {i.e., the Veronica Veronese). Notwithstanding these various projects and per- formances, it would seem that a different theme was the first which Rossetti worked upon after settling down at Kelmscott — the Proserj/me, which he always looked upon with more than wonted approval. His first exj^eriment upon this subject (I call it the first ])rovisionall3', and for convenience sake, but there may have been some at- tempts even earlier) did not satisfy him ; but he thought that it might sell as a separate thing, by cutting out the existing head, and substituting another. The subject was originally intended for Eve holding the appl-e : it was converted by afterthought into Proserpine holding the pomegranate. Then he began a second Fro'ierpine, for which he received an offer of £577 from two ac- quaintances of old standing, Mr. Charles Augustus Howell and Mr. "William Parsons, who acted as partners in some picture-buying sj)eeulations. Ry the beginning PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 81 of November the se^'ond Proserpine promised to be soon comiDleted. A careful chalk-drawing of Miss May- Morris had also been done. ]\Ir. Murray Marks, the dealer in works of art, who had been well known to Rossetti for some years past, procured this drawing", and sold it to Mr. Prange for £170, receiving in part- payment the smallish oil-picture of The Christmas Carol; and he succeeded in re-selling this picture, for a like sum of £170, to Mr. Alderson Smith. In 1876 it passed into the hands of Mr. Rae : there is a letter to that gentleman from Rossetti, saying — '^ I must make The Christmas Carol all right for you now you have got it.'''' The oil-picture of The Christmas Carol is a single half-figure of a girl playing, quite different from an earlier watercolour bearing the same title. My brother had first known Mr. Howell, an Anglo- Portuguese, then an extremely young man, towards 1857, and again, on his return from the Continent, in 1864. For some years following 1864 they were on terms of great intimacy. This had been interrupted for a year or two preceding our present date, the autumn of 1872. The familiarity was then resumed, and, uj) to the close of 1874 or thereabouts, Mr. Howell was not only a frequent visitor to Kelmscott, and a constant cor- respondent, but he became also a selling agent for Rossetti's pictures, and in that character did some very vigorous and successful strokes of work, being rich in versatile resource and in attractive personal qualities. The period of Rossetti^s business-connection with Mr. Howell must be regarded as that Avhen he was most pro- sperous as a professional man, with the least amount of trouble to himself. Providently concerting his plans with Mr. Howell, he was able to trust to that gentleman 82 DAXTE GABBIEL liOSSETTI. to cany them oat with alnindant savoir faire. In a letter from Mr. Howell^ dated in August l!S73, I observe the statement that he had readily sold sixty- eight pictures and drawings by Rossetti, which had passed through his hands in a period of six years. Ultimately both the business-connection and the personal intimacy ceased. Mr. Parsons, whom I have mentioned above, was by profession a portrait and landscape painter, who had afterwards taken to photography and also to picture-dealing. His partnership with Mr. Howell was (as I understand it) only partial, for in most of my brother^s dealings with Howell Parsons had no share at all, and many such dealings ensued after Parsons had closed his business-transactions with my brother. The first experimental version of Froserpine, and the drawing of Miss May Morris, were in November bought by Messrs. Howell aud Parsons for £300. In the same month Mr. Aldam Heaton asked Rossetti to do for a friend a watercolour head of Christ. It seems that about this time a so-called Maydalene (which I infer to be an oil-sketch of the frequently mentioned design, Marij Magdalene at the Door of SiniO)i the Pharisee) was in the hands of Mr. Clabburn, a Norwich manufacturer and art-collector, whom my brother had known for several years, and it was likely to be sold off by auction. In this and in most other cases my brother regarded the chances of an auction-room as likely to serve his interests amiss : he was therefore well pleased when Mr. Howell purchased the work from Mr. Clabburn, and sent it to Bradford to find another buyer. Messrs. Heaton and Brayshay became the purchasers, at a price of £220, on the understanding that PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 88 the painter would re-toiicli the work. Mr. Hae was inclined to buy it in the autumn of lb 7-1 : but Rossetti wrote of it in discouraging terins^ both as to its then actual value, and as to the sum which would be needed for fully w^orking it up, and the project was dropped. Two auction-sales of works belonging to jNIiss Bell, a schoolmistress with whom Mr. Ruskin was ou friendly terms, took place about the same time. At the tirst of these sales Mr. Howell bought up for a friend all the Rossetti specimens of minor account, excepting two which had been done at Hastings, representing Miss Siddal : these two (and probably also a Girl plaijing the Harp, which fetched £10) were purchased, for about £15 each, by Mr. F. S. Ellis, the publisher of Rossetti's poems, and his esteemed personal friend. One subject, termed The Carol, was bought by Mr. Leyland, acting through Howell. On the other hand, Howell had pur- chased from Leyland a design which his letter names "the Dante,'"" and the other well-known composition. How they met T/ieiiiselves (two lovers startled by encoun- tering their own wraiths in a forest) ; and Leyland was desirous that Rossetti should take back from him, at £200 or £250, the Lucrezia Borgia. The subjects thus obtained by Howell are specified as follows : Luke Preaching ; Dante and Beatrice, a drawing for a water- colour belonging to Mr. Leyland ; Dante Seated, in pencil and ink, £11 ; a man who is being knighted, the head done from Benjamin Woodward, the architect of the Museum and the Union building in Oxford; St. George and the Dragon (a slight specimen) ; a female sketch. No doubt all these works, sold by Miss Bell, had originally belonged to Ruskin. The latter, accord- ing to Mr. HowelFs account, had some years before sent g2 84 DANTE GABRIEL EOSSETTI. the Begina Cordinm (portrait of jNIrs. Dante Eossetti) to America;, and now only retained The Passover in. the Holy Family, and the Golden Water. 1873. This year opens with a letter (3rd Januar}^) hova ^Ir. William Graham, who expresses regret at havinp^ missed buying from Rossetti the picture (mentioned aforetime) named T/ie Bofrer-meadow. Mr. Gambart, who had been concerned in purchasing it from Rossetti, had now offered it to Graham for ^61000, or at lowest £90U. This tender was declined, and Mr. Dunlop had then become the purchaser. The Boat of Lore is here ag'ain mentioned — in terms which indicate that Rossetti pro- posed to execute the subject on a large scale for Mr. Leyland, and on a smaller scale for Mr. Graham. Neither project (as already indicated) took effect. Later on, three of the pictures belonging to Graham were in the hands of Rossetti, who apparently wished to do some additional work on all three. II Bamoscello was one ; also The Annunciation (now in the National Gal- lery), on which Graham asked Rossetti to do as little as possible; also the Fenns Verticordia (a smaller replica from the oil-picture), which Graham wished to receive back unaltered. The Bamoscello returned to him in June. He had bought The Annunciation for i64'25, from Messrs. Agnew. On the 1 7th January Rossetti wrote : "I have pleased myself at last with the Broserpine, having begun an entirely new one, which I feel sure is the best picture I have painted.'" All the iigure-part was by this time done, and only the drapery remained over. Proserpine is depicted as in Hades, holding the PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 85 fateful i)omegranate which debarred her from returuino- to the living- worlds with a faint reflection behind her from the light of day. This I regard as Prose7'pine No. 3 (and may at times find it convenient thus to designate it) ; the painter had an idea of getting it introduced to the notice of Sir William (now Lord) Armstrong, who was understood to be forming a larg-e collection of pictures ; but this idea came to nothing. The two pre- vious essays a.t- Prosei'piue were now rated as only fit to be made into '' little head-pictures/^ and the painter counted upon realizing £1050 out of the three. No. 3 was nearly finished by 15th May. One of the others was in the hands of Mr. Parsons by June. Mr. Leyland was willing to buy No. 3 for £810, and offered a similar price for another picture which now first comes in for mention, Tke Hainan Widow. This latter was not per- liaj)s begun until some little while further on; and the final completion of the Troserphie was delayed till August, or indeed later. Early in March Rossetti wrote of having had down at Kelmscott a female model, found for him by Mr. Dunn ; and of having made from her a drawing, nearly down to the knees, of a naked Siren playing on an extraordinary lute — '^ certainly one of my best things.'''' This was completed by the end of the month, named Ligela Siren, and valued by the artist at £210, as, though in strictness only a crayon-drawing, it ranked as " quite an elaborate picture."^ A letter from Mr. Valpy, dated in April, refers to the works by Rossetti which he then possessed. These were the heads of Miss Wilding (the lady who sat for the head of Sibylla Palmifera^ and of La GJiirlandata, and for various other pictures) ; a portrait of Mrs. Valpy; 86 DANTE GABEIEL B0S8ETTI. La Pia (more correctly called Aurea Catena) ; Beat a Beatrix ; Sib?/ II a Palmifera ; Miss Kingdon (a draw- ing which the owner wished to get draped) ; Andromeda ; and Miss Spartali (who was by this time Mrs. Still- man). Most of these, or probably all of them, must have been crayon-drawings. Another drawing, belong- ing to Mr. Leyland, is mentioned in a letter from Rossetti dated 15th May. This was The Blessed Bamozel — the subject being, of course, from the artistes own poem so named. The crayon-drawing thus spoken of was nearly, yet not absolutely, the first instance in which the theme had been transferred by him from language into form. He referred to the drawing as ^' a very comjilete thing," and added that he was minded to paint a picture right off from it, '"^as I really believe such pictures have more unity if one does not do them from nature but from cartoons " — an important indica- tion of the growing bent of his mind, at this period, in matters of artistic invention and execution. It would seem that The Blessed Bamozel was soon afterwards begun on canvas — or even on two canvases successively. The large picture named La Ghirlandahi was com- menced in the early summer of 187o. On 1st July Rossetti wrote of it : — " My new picture of Miss Wild- ing goes on swimmingly, in spite of two No\'embcr days created on purpose for the start of it." The two heads of angels were painted from Miss j\lay jNIorris. 3Ir. Graham was willing to give £840 for this picture, or c€10()0 for the G hirlandata and the Ljigeia Siren together. ]?y the close of August the former was far advanced towards completion, and was about finished in September. The name hvevent aeeiilents. No. I had its frame smashed twice, and its glass once, besides tlie last disaster wliieli nearly destroyed it, and it had been nearly spoiled while under transfer to a fresh strainer. ^ly brother had a strong spice of superstition in his character; and I should not be at all surprised if he suspected thiit there was a "fate" against the i^yavfr- piiie pictures, gerni;me to tlieir o-rievous theme. A letter to Mr. llae, (l;ite(l in Novenilx'i-, shows in a rather iiniusinL;- li^ht tlie dislike with which Uossetti reirarded an\ clumsiness of subsidiary detail in eonuec- tion with his pictures. It had been ja'uposed to add an inscription upon the U-,\\\w oi Sibi/Ua PahniJ'crii. "An inscription," he repliee worked upon, and also TJie Blessed Damozel. 1876. This matter of The Blessed Bamozel is elucidated in a letter from Rossetti to Mr. William Graham, dated 5th April 1876. He says that he began a picture of this subject years ago ; afterwards worked upon a second such picture; and is now near to completing a third, which is intended for Graham. Among several other details, aiming to show how large a portion of the painter^s time had been given for years past to work commissioned by Graham, it is mentioned that the replica of Bante's Bream is now more than half done, and that some attention, by way of re-work, had been given to The Annnnciation picture {Ecce Ancilla Bomini) since it came into Graham's possession. For this re-work no charge had been made. This is a some- what interesting point, considering that the picture in question is now in the National Gallery. I am not FAINTIXGS AND DESIGNS. 97 well aware what the recent re-touching* may have been^ but should say that it was (in accordance with the re- quest made by 'the owner^ as noted under the date of 1873) not by any means extensive, nor of such a kind as to interfere with the genuineness of the picture as representing Rossetti in his early or expressly " Prse- raphaelite ^•' period. I think the lily in the angel^s hand was one of the alterations — or rather an addition. Nearly at the same date^ 11th April, comes a letter from Sir Joseph Noel Paton, always a most generous estimator of Rossetti's art. He says that the picture (I presume the oil sketch) of TAe Magdalene at the Boor of Simon the Pharisee was then owned by Mr. Laurie, a picture-dealer in Glasgow ; and that the painting of Pandora was among the works displayed in the Glasgow Exhibition. During" this same month of April Mr. Fry consulted E,ossetti about a drawing which he had purchased of Mr. Howell, and of which he now sent the painter a sketch. Rossetti replied that the drawing represented Madonna Pietra, a lady to whom Dante in his exile addressed a celebrated little poem in the peculiar form named Sestina. The crystal globe in the hand of the figure was intended to present the reflection of a rocky land- scape, symbolizing the lady's pitiless heart. In the study, the figure was nude ; but in the projected picture she would have been chiefly draped, and her upper hand was to have been holding some of the drapery. Rossetti added that he still proposed to paint the subject, but in a different action : this project remained unfulfllled. In June Rossetti mentioned to Mr. Fry that he had lately finished an oil-picture named La Ricordanza, or The Lamp of Memorij (also at times termed Mnemosyne), u 98 BANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. and he offered it to this gentleman for £500. This work did not, however, pass into jNIr. Fry^s hands. It lino-ered a long- while in Rossetti^s studio, and was at last, towards 1881, sold to Mr. Leyland. From BogTior my brother returned to his house in Cheyne Walk ; and in the summer he paid a visit to two of his kindest and most considerate friends, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, at their seat of Broadlands in Hampshire. He executed there a portrait in chalks of Lady Mount-Temple. He went on also with the pic- ture of The Blessed Damozel. For the head of an infant ang-el which appears in the front of this picture he made drawing's from two children — one being the baby of the llev. H. C. Hawtrev, and the other a workhouse infant. The former sketch was presented to the parents of the child, and the latter to Lady Mount-Temple ; and the head with its wings was painted on to the canvas at ISroadlands. Here he made the acquaintance also of Mrs. Sumner, a lady of commanding presence, who, after his return to London, favoured him with sit- tings for various heads. One of them was named iJoiiilzia Scaligera. 1877. It was towards the beginning of this year, say in the final days of January, that the large picture of Venus Astarte was brought to a conclusion. I think that my brother was always wont to regard this as his most exalted j)erformance ; ranking it, in a certain propor- tionate scale, along with the Dante's Dream and the Proserpine. The Dante's Dream — in point of dimensions, and as a composition of several figures telling a moving story, and moreover from its relation to the supreme PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 99 poet of his special and lifelong homage — naturally took the first place ; but he probably accounted it to be less developed in style and execution. The Proserjiine, an invention of his own, satisfied him best as a thing achieved — an adequate realization of his conception : it was, however, smaller in size and simpler in subject than either of the others. Into the Venus Asfarte he had put his utmost intensity of thinking, feeling, and method — he had aimed to make it equally strong in abstract sentiment and in physical grandeur — an ideal of the mystery of beauty, offering a sort of combined quintessence of what he had endeavoured in earlier years to embody in the two several types of Sibi/lla Palmifera and LUitfi, or (as he ultimately named them in the respective sonnets) Soul's Beauty and Body's Beauty. It may be well to remark that, by the time when he completed the Venus Astarte, or Astarte Syriaca, he had got into a more austere feeling than of old with regard to colour and chiaroscuro ; and the charm of the picture has, I am aware, been less, to many critics and spectators of the work, than he would have deemed to be its due, as compared with some of his other performances of more obvious and ostensible attraction. Mr. Fry, who purchased the Venus Astarte, became also the owner of the original and very finished pen-and-ink design of the same composition. He was minded to exhibit the picture in the Grosvenor Gallery, then a new enterprise : but Rossetti raised a decided objection to this proposal, and referred Mr. I^^y to a letter which the painter had recently published in Tke Times regard- ing his non-appearance in exhibitions generally, and in the Grosvenor Gallery in particular. This letter is cer- tainly not the writing of a self-conceited man ; for H 2 300 BAXTE GABRIEL E08SETTI. it substantially amounts to saying that Rossetti with- held his pictures from the eyes of the public in exhibi- tion-rooms because they never rightly sjitisfied his own eye in his studio. In February one of Eossetti^s large chalk heads^ the Bonna della Finestra (or Lady of the IFindoiv, from Dante^s Tita Nova), was being autotyped for sale ; and it was soon afterwards followed by the Silence, and by the Head of Dante, a study for the figure in the picture of Dante's Dream. In Aj^ril mention is made of a large watercolour painted as far back as 1868, and resembling to a great extent the small oil-picture named Bocca Baciata. The watercolour, entitled La Bionda del Balcone, belonged to Sir William Bowman, who wrote that he would like Rossetti to re-inspect it, as some change had occurred in the pigF: ts. In the same month begins an interchange of letup's with Mr. Valpy concerning certain works by Rossetti which this gentleman had received from Mr. Howell. It may suffice here to say that an oil head of Beatrice is named as among the works ; also a figure termed Beatrice's Maid, which had at one time been erroneously regarded as a study for The Sea-Spell ; two or three of the studies for the picture of Dante's Dream ; and a chalk-drawing of two boy-Cupids for the Bella Mano, which drawing, as being a nudity, was distasteful to I\Ir. Valpy. The oil-picture oi Xh^ B I essed Damozel ,comm\ss\onQ^ by Mr. Graham, was finished about the end of April. A letter from Mr. Le\ land, dated 31st July, bears record of one of the subjects which my brother intended to paint, but which in fact he never executed — I even think he never l)egan it. This subject is termed Hero ; and the picture was, 1 believe, to have represented Hero PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 101 standing with her torch to give hght to her wave-buffet- ing lover Leander, perhaps on that very night of storm and doom whe^- the Hellespont engulfed him. It was to have been of like size and price with other pictures for each of which Mr. Leyland had paid £840. A similar sum was indeed actually paid for the Hero, and must have been afterwards transferred to the account for some other picture. I cannot but regret that this work, which seemed highly suited to my brother^s powers, was not carried out. The idea of executing it seems to have been finally abandoned — or at least indefinitely post- poned—in the autumn of 1880. In the late summer of 1877, in consequence of an infirmity for which surgical treatment had been required, my brother fell into a state of great languor and prostration d, under the more than fraternal escort of Madox Bro^vu, he removed to Hunter^s Forestal, near Heme Bay, and for some few weeks appeared incapable of resuming the implements of his art. Our mother and our sister Christina were soon with him; and at last, with an uncertain hand and great misgivings as to the result, he made an attempt at a life-sized chalk- portrait group of the two — head and shoulders. Fortu- nately the experiment turned out a complete success ; and he perceived at once that nothing but an effort of will was needed to enable him to continue working at his art with undiminished faculty of head and hand. Two separate chalk heads of Christina were done about the same time, and with a result equally reassuring. His mind now reverted to a head which he had pre- viously done from Mrs. Stillman, as a preliminary to a picture of A Vision of Fiammetta ; and, not long after returning to London in the autumn, he was favoured 102 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. with some further sittings from jNIrs. Stillmaii, and made the Fiaimneffa picture ore of his principal concerns. It seems to have been brought to some degree of com- pletion before tlie end of the year, but was not finally sent off to its owner — Mr. Turner — until October 1878. Fiammetta, her head encircled (as Eoccaccio descrii'cs it) by a mystical flame, is shown standing, parting with her hand the bloom-laden boughs of an apple-tree. As had long previously been the case with the roses and honey- suckles in the Venus Verticorclia, Rossetti found a great deal of trouble in satisfying his feeling as an artist in procuring good apple-blossom to paint from in the Fiammetta. At last he called in the friendly aid of Mr. Shields as. a caterer, writing more than one letter on the subject, and averring that he " would of course be glad to pay anything for good blossom." In the autumn another of Rossetti^s chalk-drawings was autotyped, entitled FerJascnra (Dark Pearl). I hardly think it was placed on sale along with the other subjects previously mentioned. Mr. Turner bought two more pictures in 1877. One was the small oil-]iainting entitled Water-ioilloio . The female figure in this painting is (as Rossetti defined it in a letter to Mr. Turner), '' as it were, speaking to you, and embodying in her expression the penetrating sweetness of the scene and season."^ The second picture was a Proserpine — the same which I have in a previous in- stance spoken of as No. '"5. I have more than once found that opinions differ as to the comparative merits of this No. '■) and the No. 4 disposed of at an earlier date to Mr. Leyland — some persons preferring the one version, and some the other. My own suffrage is for Mr. Leyland^s picture ; but at auy rate the question of superiority has PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 103 to be weighed in a nice balance. My brothei' finally preferred No. 3. He bad, before effecting- the sale to Mr. Turner, offered to Mr. Kae both this picture and the Water-willow. In doing so he wrote that the Proserpine — which, although begun earlier than Mr. Leyland^s version of the subject, had been still worked on to some extent towards the opening of 1877 — was ''unquestionably the finer of the two, and is the very flower of my work.^'' The prices named to Mr. Kae were £315 for Water-willow, and £1050 for Proserpine. Probably enough Mr. Turner disbursed the same sums. After a while a question arose of sending to a public exhibition in Manchester, got up in aid of the Art- Schools building-fund, some o£ the pictures by Rossetti belonging to Mr. Turner. As usual, the painter ex- pressed a great reluctance to this proposal; finally he waived his objection so far as the Proserpine was con- cerned, but adhered to it in relation to the other ex- amples. The pictures by Eossetti which had belonged to Mr. Turner were brought to the hammer at Christie's in 1888. It may not be out of place to note here the prices which they fetched. The largest price — indeed, a dis- proportionately large one — came to the Fiammetta — £1£07. The Proserpine went for £745; Water-willow (far below its value, I think), £136 ; Joli Cmur, £230 ; Washing Hands (watercolour), £153 ; the Pose (water- colour), £89. There was also a Mnemosyne, £43, which may, I presume, be a crayon head. The year closes (3 1st December) with a request from Mr. Graham that Rossetti would take in hand the pre- della — an afterthought — for the Blessed Bamozel. It may be as well to explain that the subject of the picture 104 DAXTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. is the Blessed Damozel leaning over " the gold bar of heaven/' and looking earthward with a yearning gaze, while behind her the background" is filled with groups of blue-clad lovers embracing, reunited in their eternal mansion. The predella — which got executed in five or six weeks — was to represent the DamozeFs lover discon- solate on earth, and looking, through dark autumnal foliage, towards the perturbed sky. I hardly know w^hether the idea of this predella — certainly very appro- priate for completing pictorially the subject-matter em- bodied in the poem — came from Rossetti himself, or from Mr. Graham ; perhaps rather from the latter. He oifered to add for the predella, if done without delay, a sum of £150 to the £1000 which had been already paid for the picture. 187 8. One of Rossetti's latest watercolours was a female head named Bruna Brunellescki. It now belonged to ]Mr. A'alpy, who, being in Rome in February of the present year, asked the painter to send it in the first in- stance to Canon Bell. After a while however Rossetti resumed ownership of the Bruna Brunellescki, deliver- ing" something- else in exchane^e for it. A watercolour Proserpine, costing £202, was sold in the summer to Mr. Ellis. Another upset now ensued in relation to the larger and earlier version of the Dante's Dream, which we have already seen transferred from the possession of Mr. Graham to that of Mr. Yalpy. The last-named gentleman, towards the middle of the year, was con- templating to retire from the active pursuit of his profession as a solicitor, to quit London finally, and to PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 105 settle down in Bath. Rossetti, as he wrote to Mr. Valpy, could not reconcile himself to the removal of this picture to so remote a residence. It had from the first been apparent that Mr. Valpy, after committing him- self, at the instance of Mr. Howell, to the purchase of this larg-e work, had regarded it as somewhat out of scale with his moderate establishment, and with the other specimens of art pertaining- to that, and that he would not unwillingly have entered into some different arrangement, had he but felt himself free to do so. Rossetti therefore (it must certainly have been he who took the initiative) proposed that Mr. Valpy should resign to him the Bante's Bream, and receive in substi- tution for it other works, all of minor dimensions, to a total value not only equivalent to that of the relin- quished picture, but even definitely larger ; thus giving Mr. Valpy an advantage in the terms of exchange, to smooth over any possible asperity incident to such a transaction. Indeed, a value of no less than £1995 is spoken of by Rossetti, as against the £1575 at which the Bante's Bream had been priced ; but the £1995 was to be reduced to about £1650 by the return to Rossetti of some secondary works — chalk heads &c. — belono-ino' to Valpy. An even larger value — £2;J.30 — is specified at a later date in the letter-writing. From Auo-ust onward, a good deal of correspondence — at times rather tentative and complicated in detail — proceeded between Rossetti and Mr. Valp3^ At one stage two replicas from works belonging to Mr. Leyland were proposed. Afterwards it was felt by the painter that this would not be con- sistent \\nith Mr. Leyland^s liking. He then offered only one such replica — either the Sea-Spell (of reduced size) or the Veronica Veronese, at Valpy^s option ; along with 106 DANTE GABBIEL IWSSETTI. an oil-picture already begun — Gretchen (from Faust), trying-on the jewels, a subject for which a different title — Risen at Datv)i — was soon adopted; a duplicate Blessed Damozel, or something- else ; and a Proserpine, a reduction in oils, or else a watercolour. Deferring to Mr. Valpy^s rooted dislike of any nudity, the painter expressed himself willing to drape the bosom and part of the shoulders of the Gretchen. Afterwards a Joan of Arc kissino- the sword of deliverance was offered. Of this subject a watercolour, the property of Lady Ash- burton, was at the time lying in the painter^s studio ; and he proposed to paint another larger version of it in oil. He stipulated that the works to be exchanged for the Dante's Dream would not be deliverable until after he should have succeeded in re-selling that picture ; and with a view to re-sale, he at once offered it at a diminished price to Mr. Turner, who however proved ir- responsive. In the course of this Valpy correspondence Uossetti observes that he had scarcely ever made a full- sized replica of any life-sized picture — had only done so in the case of the Beaia Beatrir, and of one other subject, which I should presume to be the Proserpine. Of the watercolour Joan of Arc he says, " Neither in ex|)ression, colour, nor design, did I ever do a better thing.'' In October, having despatched the Vision of Fiam- metta to its purchaser Mr. Turner, Rossetti turned his mind to some new subject. He fixed upon Desdemona's Death-Son;/ — where Desdemona sits crooning the willow- song, as Emilia combs out her hair. For this subject he made several studies and designs, the composition being altered more than once. He diil not, I think, actually begin painting it on the canvas, but he must PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 107 have come very near to so doing". He was particularly occupied with this theme in the summer of 1881. In the last month of the year Mr. Valpy arranged with my brother that Miss Williams, the daughter of a lady residing at Shirley Hall, Tunhridge Wells, was to sit to him for a chalk portrait. It was finished in May of the following year. 1879. A letter to Mr. Graham, dated in May, shows that the replica of .Dante's Dream, long ago commissioned by that gentleman, was now so far advanced as to be quite ready for glazing. The double predella for this picture was expected to be completed very soon afterwards. The entire work was in fact finished, by the end of November ; but then the painter avowed himself not satisfied with the figure of Beatrice, and held it over for altei'ation. The predella represents (1) Dante sick in body and perturbed in mind, dreaming his troublous dream, watched by ladies of his family ; and {'Z) Dante narrating his dream to the same ladies. Both these incidents appertain to the poem which the picture illus- trates. A full-sized monochrome of the old subject, Found — also due to Mr. Graham — was in hand in May as an aid towards bringing the picture itself to a con- clusion. About the same date another picture was painted, and was purchased by Mr. Ellis, who received it towards the end of the year. This is La Donna della Finestra, the same subject (sometimes bearing the alternative title of The Ladij of Fity) of which more than one chalk drawing had previously been done ; but I think the successive treatments of the theme always varied in 108 BANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. arrangement. This ranks, I think, among- my brother's most mature paintings; the expression being at once deep and reserved. It may be worth mentioning that the Donna della Finestra is (in the narrative in Dante^s Vita Nova) a lady who looked from a window upon Dante when sunk in sorrow for the death of Beatrice, and whose aspect manifested so much pity for him that he was after a while almost ku'ed into falling^ in love with her. According to the allegorical interpre- tation of the Vila Nova (an interpretation for which Dante's own statements in the Convito ai'e largely responsible), this same lady really represents Philosophy ; but Rossetti had no sympathy with any downright allegory of that sort, and, in representing the Donna della Finestra, he had no notion of representing Philo- sophy, or any abstract personification of like kind. He contemplated the Donna as a real woman ; but neither was her human reality intended to be regarded as the essence of the pictorial presentment — rather her per- sonal reality subserving the purpose of poetic suggestion — an emotion embodied in feminine form — a passion- of which beautiful flesh-and-blood constitutes the vesture. Humanly she is the Lady at the Window ; mentally she is the Lady of Pity. This interpenetration of soul and body — this sense of an equal and indefeasible reality of the thing symbolized, and oh" the form which conveys the symbol — this externalism and internalism — are con- stantly to be understood as the key-note of" llossetti's aim and performance in art. I have emphasized the point here, as the particular subject from the Vita Nova, with its dubious balance (so far as Dante's intention is concerned) between the actual and the allegorical, seemed to invite some such observations ; but remarks to the like PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 109 effect mig-lit have been made in relation to many of the works of my brother previously specified, and they apply to the general range and sco^^e of his art from first to last. It may have been in 1879 that Rossetti made a chalk portrait of Mr. Leyland, as a weddiug-g-ift to that gentleman^s daughter, Mrs. Hamilton. The picture which occupied him most towards the end of the year, and for some months ensuing, was the full- length figure entitled at starting Monna Primavera, but afterwards The Daydream — a youthful lady seated in the fork of a sycamore-tree, with a book and a sprig of honeysuckle (the flower had at first been the snow- drop). This is perhaps the only instance in which one of his life-sized ideal female figures was pictured at whole length. Mr. Constautine lonides, a friendly acquaintance of old standing, saw the painting in progi'ess, or perhaps rather he saw the chalk-drawing which served as foundation for the painting ; and he showed a disposition, which took effect, to become its purchaser. Hereupon Rossetti addressed to him on the 5th October a letter which gives some practical details. He says that the price of The Daijdream would be £735 ; being lower (as it certainly was) than the scale of prices which had prevailed in Mr. Graham^s commissions. For instance. La Ghirlandata had cost £840, the Beata Beatrix £1102, the Blessed Bamozel £1207.* The Fiammetta, sold to Mr. Turner, had brought £840 ; and its price would have been higher but for the fact that Mr. Turner purchased several works at once. Rossetti added * This price (apparentlj' through substituting guineas for pounds) exceeds the pi-ice named under the year 1877 : I fancy the guineas are probably correct. no BANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTI. that the drawing serving- for T//e Daydream was his favourite amonty all those which he had done from the same sitter, Mrs. William jSIorris. 1880. Early in this year Rossetti was occupied in com- pleting- the picture of La Pia, commissioned several years before by Mr. Leyland ; and his friend Mr. Charles Fairfax Murray, settled in Florence as a painter and airent for works of art, obliged him bv sending over a sketch of the scenery of the fever-stricken Maremma, needed for the background of this picture. He after- wards forwarded some photographs of picturesque ancient street-views from Siena, to guide Rossetti in composing the background of a Florentine street, applicable to his later painting of The Sahdat'wn of Beatrice, which illustrates more particularly the sonnet of the Floren- tine poet, ''Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare." This painting was probably begun in 1880, and was con- tinued in 1881 : it was purchased by Mr. Leyland for jK68^, and had reached a stage not very remote from completion at the date when my brother's shaken and failing health passed into the final stages of disease, and he could work no more upon the canvas. The same o-entleman also bou"-ht towards November the second version of The Blessed Bamozel — an oil-painting- differing considerably (especially in lacking the back- ground groups) from the first version, in the possession of IMr. Graham. Rossetti accepted for the second version a sum — £500 — much below the usual range of his prices in these latter years. The work had remained long on hand, and more than one disappointment had occurred with regard to its sale, and the picture- PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. Hi market generally was then in a rather depressed con- dition. A desig-n in pen-and-ink of T/ie Sonnet was produced, to be sent as a present to our mother for her eig-htieth birthday, 27th April. It embodies the same ideas of the typical quality of the sonnet-form of verse which are expressed in a sonnet which my brother wrote to accompany it. An engraving- of this design forms the frontispiece to the book on Rossetti which Mr. William Sharp published in 188^, soon after his death. A letter of this year refers to a painting which Rossetti had executed as far back as 1861. It is an Annunciation, done upon the pulpit in the church built by Mr. Bodley at Scarborough. In 1880 a Manchester picture-buyer, wdio admired this composition, notified a wish to obtain a duplicate of it : nothing however came of this proposal. The ])icture of Tke Daydream was still proceeding meanwhile. Rossetti worked upon it with earnest assiduity, sparing no pains to bring it up to his highest standard, and altering freely when he found that some improvement could be effected. In July he effaced the head first ])ainted-in, and proceeded to substitute another ; the original head had never impressed him as being quite equal to the one in the cartoon. In August the Beata Beatrix intended for Mr. Yalpy was nearly finished, and Rossetti expected to deliver it shortly. The old picture named Found was again much in my brother's thoughts towards the end of this year. It had long been due to its last commissioning purchaser, Mr. Graham ; and would probably about this time have been actually finished, had it not been that an 112 DANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTL unfortunate diiference of view arose between the pur- chaser and the painter with regard to transactions dating- several years back. Mr. Graham had at that period commissioned the Dantesque subject T//e Boat of Love, as well as the Found, each of them at £840 ; and had made, on account of both of these works, certain payments which he now claimed a right of concentrating on the Found alone, thus dropping altogether the proposed purchase of The Boat of Love. Naturally this variation of plan was not agreeable to Rossetti, who maintained that the payments ought to continue dis- tributed as at first purposed^ and that additional sums remained due for each picture, and that his unrelin- quished intention of at some time taking up The Boat of Love, and carrying it to completion as a work bespoken by ]\Ir. Graham, should not be thus thwarted. His interests were obviously at stake ; and of these, though not inclined to urge them harshly or graspingly, he was always somewhat tenacious. The result of the whole controversy was untoward. Found- remained uncompleted, and T/ie Boat of Love, except in its olden form of" a large monochrome in oil, was never even begun. There is a letter dated in November from Mr. Arthur Hughes the painter, showing that preparations were then being made for finishing Found. As Mr. Hughes resided in the country, he undertook to oblige Rossetti by looking out for a smock-frock, to be used for paintings the costume of the male figure m Found. My brother, living a severely secluded life in his latter years, was out of the way of attending to such matters for himself": it was his good fortune to have various friends Avho never grudged to render him the requisite aid. PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 113 1881. Of this year, the last which my brother lived to see completed, the principal transaction was the sale, to the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, the municipal or public collection of that city, of the original and larger version of the oil-painting Dante's Bream. As we have already seen, this painting, finished in 1871, was at first sold to Mr. Graham. He, finding it too large for advantage- ous hanging in his house — spacious though that was — resigned it after a while in exchange for a reduced duplicate. The larger picture was. then purchased by Mr. Valpy; who had not long been its j^ossessor when his removal from London to Bath re-opened the question of the location of the picture, and Rossetti then induced him to retur.n it, in exchange for various other and smaller works. The Dante's Dream reverted to Rossetti^s house, perhaps at the beginning of 1879 ; and there it remained unsold, and monopolizing a large space in his studio, until the arrangement for its purchase for Liverpool reached a conclusion. That arrangement was by no means plain sailing : it had its ups and downs, and at one moment seemed to the artist to have failed altogether. However, he had two staunch allies throughout. One of these, and indeed the first suggester of the idea that the authorities of the Liver- pool Gallery might be induced to bid for the picture, was Mr, T. Hall Caine ; who, having recently given up his connection with an architectural firm in Liverpool, had been received as a resident in my brother's house, 16 Cheyne Walk, doing his endeavour. (not too successfully at times, I may admit) to brighten his solitude and re- lieve his now permanent sense of despondency, and at T 114 DANTE GABEIEL ROSSETTI. any rate undertaking- on his behalf many g^ood offices of a miscellaneous kind. I say " his solitude/^ because the attached artistic assistant who had for several years been domiciled with my brother, Mr. Henry Treffry Dunn, had of late ceased to be in the house, althoug-h his pro- fessional aid was still at times called into requisition. Mr. Caine took a very active part in managing the disposal of the Dante's Dream to Liverpool, revisiting that city more than once on his own affairs, and partly on Hossetti^s, and he showed equal perseverance and address in bringing the matter to a head. The second ally was Mr. Edward Samuelson, a leading member of the Liverpool Corporation, Avho from the first showed a strong inclination to get the picture purchased, and stuck to his text, spite of opposition here or lukewarm- ness there, until his object was accomplished. Li visiting London and my brother^s studio on two or three occasions, he secured the painter^s personal regard and liking, and he kept up with him an active correspondence as to details. The first letter which I find on this subject is one from Mr. Samuelson, dated 8th March. It refers to his having called at llossetti''s studio, with a view to treating- for the i)urchase. By 2nd May matters had proceeded so far that jNIr. Samuelson expressed in writing' his opinion that Kossetti might now beg-in making certain alterations Avhieh the painter himself considered desirable in the picture. These proposed alterations, which he proceeded at once to effect, related to two points in especial : the drapery of the lady who stands at the head of the dead Beatrice, and in this respect a manifest improvement was effected ; and the head of Beatrice herself, which Kossetti thought lit to PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 115 (ihange from a brunette to a blonde type. I for my own part never regarded this as an advantage : the head was painted from a brunette, and the change in the colour of the hair, even had it been iu itself beneficial, was less in unison with the mould of feature and the personal type. This seems to me one more instance of the rule that, when my brother recurred to and modified an old picture, he seldom bettered it. Before undertaking these alterations, Rossetti stipulated that he could only do so upon the understanding that the picture must be deemed practically sold to the Walker Gallery. On this condition, he would be able to deliver the work by the end of August, if £500, out of the full price of £1575, were previously paid, the balance remaining to be dis- charged by the close of the year. He could not consent to send the picture to Liverpool at all, unless in the character of a purchased work : this restriction referred to the fact that it had been proposed that the painting- should in the first instance figure as a contribution to the ordinary annual exhibition in Liverpool, from which it was to pass into the Walker Gallery — nominally as bought for the Liverpool public out of the annual ex- hibition, but really under a strict precontract of sale and purchase. Satisfactory assurances being given on these points, the re-painting was actually begun early in June, and was finished before the end of the month, and re- garded by the artist as a decided amelioration. Other difficulties however ensued ; or perhaps my brother, who in his later years was of anything but a sanguine or buoyant temperament, imagined that spokes were inserted in his wheel when in fact that mechanism was running smoothly enough : at any rate, he wrote to me on 3rd August announcing that the proposed purchase of the I 2 116 DANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTT. picture had collapsed. Soon however Mr, Caine was enabled to satisfy Rossetti that there was no ground for discouragement or dubiety : and on 9th August the painter wrote again to Mr. Samuelson quoting Mr. Caine's assurances, and proposing to send the picture to Liverpool — perhaps after an interval of a few days, as he might yet be putting a final touch to it. He required that his own printed description of the work should appear reriatim in the exhibition-catalogue, and pointed out that the pietvire ought to be hung so as to slope slightly forward. These arrangements were ratified by Mr. Samuelson on the 11th : he stated that the terms of purchase had then been confirmed by the Arts Committee, and would now be completed, and the picture therefore should be forwarded. By the 17th it had arrived in Liverpool. The price was fixed at a sum of £1650, minus the usual commission to the exhibiting gallery. By the 7th of September it was definitively bought for the Walker Collection. My brother was not wanting in a feeling of gratitude to any one who, like Mr. Samuelson, undertook to do him a service in a matter of art, and who held steadily to his purpose. He requested Mr. Samuelson to accept as an acknow- ledgment a crayon study for the head of Dante in the oil-picture ; an offer which was gracefully assented to. 1 1 need hardly be said that this disposal of his largest and most important painting, a work which may be termed monumental in subject and size, was entirely pleasing to the artist. That it should obtain a per- manent home, and should hold a' conspicuous place in a public gallery of only less than metropolitan import- ance, was the fate he would himself have selected for it. I should add that this was the last salient PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 117 artistic transaction of his life^ and was almost coincident with his last appearance in the field of authorship — his new volume entitled Ballads and Sonnets, along" with the reissue, in a modified form, of his volume Poems of 1870, takinw place almost directly afterwards. He then, in quest of health and repose, left London for a brief sojourn at Fisher Place, in the Vale of St. John, near Keswick in Cumberland : but health was no more to be his, nor any repose save that of the deathbed and the g-rave. Other doings of the year 1881 remain to be men- tioned. It may have been early in this year, or perhaps in 1880, that an etching from his old pen-and-ink de- sign of Hamlet and Ophelia, where the lady returns to the prince his love-gifts of less agitated days, was made by Mr. J. S. B. Haydon — a gentleman whom Hossetti in youth had known slightly as a sculptor, and who afterwards engaged in business as a print-seller, and of whom my brother saw a good deal in these closing years. The etching (of which I now possess the copper) was a vigorous effective performance, and very like the original in most essentials, but diverging from it in method by being somewhat heavy and rough, instead of delicately keen. My brother, though anxious to accommodate Mr. Haydon in this and other matters, felt that on the whole he would not wish the etching- to be published as a print. Mr. Haydon could but acquiesce, and reconsigned the copper to the designer's keeping. The oil-picture of La Pla — so many years in hand — must have been finally completed late in the summer of 1881. There is a letter from Mr. Leyland, dated 12th July, asking that the glazing of the picture might 118 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTL soon be finished. In August Rossetti was paiutino- some mag-nolias into a new version of the Donna della Finestra — a work which he did not live to complete, nor even to carry up to any considerable point of advance. Early in August the replica of the Beafa Beatrix (it may perhaps have been on a reduced scale) was delivered to Mr. Valpy^ as one of the various items which were to serve as an equivalent for the relinquished and now re-sold Dante's Dream. Mr. Valpy found the flesh of the Beatrix somewhat too dark for his liking; and Rossetti consented to receive the picture back for a while, and lighten the tints. Another of the Yalpy paintings, the reduced replica of Prosei'pine, was in hand at the end of September, during my brother's brief stay at Fisher Place, after the Liverpool transac- tion had reached its conclusion. 1882. The above is the latest detail regarding my brother's works of art which I find recorded in the correspondence. It will not be out o£ place, however, to say that this smaller Proserpine, and more especially the Joan of Arc kissing the sword of deliverance (another of the Valpy commissions), must have been the very last canvases to which he set his hand, stiffening within the clasp of Death. Early in 1882 he finally left London for Birch- ington-on-Sea, near Margate, where one of the bungalow- villas (now named Rossetti Bungalow) was liberally placed at his disposal by his old friend, the architect Mr. John P. Seddon, with the assent of its owner, Mr. Cobb. The two pictures in i^uestion were taken down by him to the bungalow. They were already nearly linished ; and some further touches bestowed upon them at PAINTINGS AND DESIGNS. 119 Bircliing-ton broug-ht them to a state of practical comple- tion, such as to allow of their being delivered, after Ros- setti^s death, to the purchaser. In his failing state of health, the consideration of the large amount of work which he owed to Mr. Valpy, to compensate for the Dante's Dream, hung weightily on his mind ; and his last attempts, spite of disease and pain, were to clear off this obligation. The night, " wherein no man can work,"' came on Easter Sunday the Uth of April 1882. WRITINGS. WRITINGS. 1843. As it happens, the year ISiS, which is the first that we found bearing some record of the work of Dante Rossetti in design, is also the first to which we can advert as respects his writings. On 14th August of this year, his age being then fifteen, he wrote to our mother that he had done a third chapter of Sorroitiiw. This Sor- rentiiio was a prose tale of the romantic and thrillinj kind, in which the Devil bore a conspicuous part. It was narrated in the first person, with considerable detail of incident and emotion. The scene must have been laid in Italy (I think Venice), as deducible from the surname '' Sorrentino.^'' I cannot however recollect that my brother took any particular pains to give an Italian colouring to his story, nor that he concerned himself much as to. the date at which it might be sup- posed to occur; perhaps the first half of the seventeenth century should in a vague way be assumed. The Devil was, for literary and inventive purposes, a great favourite with my brother, before, during, and after, the period when he wrote Sorreritino. I apprehend that Gothe's Faiost must have been about the first form in which diabolism became a potent influence on his mind — the outlines of Retzsch from the great drama having been highly familiar to him at a very early age (say six), and, along with the outlines, some relevant extracts from the drama itself. A multitude of fantastic stories — such as Der Freisckiitz, Peter/ 124 DANTE GABlilEL ROSSETTI. ScJdemild, The Bottle Imp, The Diamond Watch, Fitz- balPs Devil Stork, and in especial Maturings romance of Melmoth the JFanderer, along with Manfred and The Deformed Tranftformed. in poetry — passed through the crucible of his mind. The Prince of Darkness was, in his conception^ constantly "a gentleman" — not a horrid wild beast of horns, tail, and talons, but a personage mixing in human society, tempting, prompting, and blasting, the actions of the beings upon whom he operated, /in Sorrentino the Devil was mainly of the Mephistophelian order — 'caustic, cynical, and malignant, with a certain Byronic tinge as well) 1 cannot remem- ber exactly what j^art he played in the narrative, which began as a love-story, more or less. I rather think he assumed! from time to time the person of the hero] and, by his misdeeds in this character, brought the victim into bad odour with his lady-love. There still exists a duplicate design which my brother made (sufficiently boyish) illustrating a scene in the tale : the lady seated, and the lover — or the Devil personating the lover — standing behind her chair. I recollect also an incident — perhaps the last in the i;nfinished narrative — of a duel ; the hero was, I fancy, opposed to his rival in love, and, greatly to his disgust, was turned from an honest duelist into a virtual assassin by the unwished-for aid which the Devil (like Mephistopheles in the aft'ray with Valentine) afforded him. AVhat was written of Sorren- tino may have been some four or five chapters, of the length of chapters in an ordinary novel. I thought it extremely good at the time; and even now I believe that, were it recoverable, it would be found vastly superior (this is not saying much) to the early ballad-poem, Sir Hugh the Heron, written by my brother WRITINGS. 125 about the same period. No trace, however, remains of Sorrenti?io. Its author must have advisedly destroyed it; I dare say^ as early as 1848 or 1847. Another work of dial/lerie in which my brother de- lighted intensely — but it must have been some two or three years later than tlie date of Sorrentiiio — was Les Memoires du Diable, by Frederic Soulie; also the Contes Fanfastiques of Hotfmanii, in a French translation, but of these stories there are perhaps few^ or hardly any, that deal with the Devil himself. 1845. Among my brother's early efforts in translation (which were chiefly from the German — Blirger^s Lenore, the opening chaunts of the Nibelungenlied, Hartmann von Aue's Arme Ileinrick, &c.) came one from the French, or presumably from the Italian in a French version — a ballad from Prosper Merimee^s famous Corsican tale, Colomba. On re-inspecting Colomba, I find it to contain three ballads, given in the form of French prose ; they begin respectively — " Dans la vallee bien loin derriere les montagnes/^ " Charles Baptiste, le Christ receive ton ame/^ and " L'epervier se reveillera, il deploiera ses ailes.^' The translation has lapsed from my memory, but I have no doubt that its original was the last of these three ballads. 1847. I observe, in a letter dated as late as 1873, a refer- ence to the poem of The Blessed Bamozel, which may as well find mention here. This poem, as Rossetti in- formed Mr. Hall Caine, was written in his nineteenth 12G DANTE GABRIEL IIOSSETTI. year, which terminated with 11th May 1817. In the letter in question he observes that IVie Blessed Da maze I was written to be inserted in a sort of manuscript family-mag^azine named Hodgepodge, which was con- cocted, never passing- beyond the range of the family circle, during some months or weeks of 1847, or pos- sibly 1846. The poem named The Portrait (which had been considerably altered and improved before it ap- peared in tlie Poems published in 1870) had a similar origin. 1848. Rossetti wrote two sonnets for his first picture^ TIte Girlhood of Mary Virgin; one of them was composed on 21st November 1848. It was probably the sonnet which begins — " This is that blessed Mary, pre- elect God's Virgin," and which was printed in the catalogue of the Free Exhibition, when the picture appeared there in 1849, and reprinted in the volume Poews. The second sonnet, commencing " These are the symbols,^'' was inscribed on the frame of the painting, but was not otherwise pub- lished by the author. As this second composition explains with minuteness the details of the picture, and as these cannot have been far advanced in November 1848, I infer that the sonnet composed in that month must have been the one first mentioned. 1849. Up to this year Eossetti had never been further abroad than to Boulogne and its neighbourhood. The autumn of 1849 was rendered memorable to him by his WRITINGS. 127 visiting-, in company with Mr. Holman Hunt, Paris, and some of the principal cities of Belgium — Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges. Short and unextensive and unad venturous as this trip was, it remained never- theless the least inconsiderable one which my brother ever undertook. He re-visited Belgium, in my company, once afterwards, and Paris two or three times ; but he did not again cover, in any single tour, so lai-ge a space of ground as in 1849. On 18th September, just before starting for the Continent, he wrote to me that he had observed in the Gesfa Romanorum a story, of which he sent me a modi- fied prose version of his own, naming it The Scrip and Stajf : this was the foundation of his poem bearing- nearly the same title, and written, I think, not im- mediately afterwards, but within two or three years ensuing. His letter of September expressed the inten- tion of versifying this tale, and also another story of his own invention, which may, I suppose, have been the Last Confession. He had written but little lately : twelve additional stanzas of Bride-chamber Talk (the long but uncompleted narrative poem which is now entitled The Bride's Prelude), and three stanzas added '^as stop- gaps^'' to Ml/ Sisfer's Sleep. This last-named short poem hadlDeen written some considei-able while before, I should think not later than 1847. My brother^s ob- ject in inserting " stop-gaps " must no doubt have been to make the composition available for the then forth- coming Prseraphaelite magazine. The Germ, in whose opening number it appeared. If my memory does not deceive me, it may have been printed once before. As my brother was growing up towards manhood he became acquainted with Major Calder Campbell, an officer 123 DAXTE GABRIEL BOSSETTI. retired from the Indian army, and a rather prolific pro- ducer of verses and tales in annuals and magazines, and at times in volumes : an eminentl}^ amiable and kindly old bachelor (or rather then elderly bachelor, as his ag'e may have been about fifty-five), i^^ossipy, and a little scandal-loving, who conceiv^ed a very high idea of my brother^'s powers. He must, I think, have been the first literary man familiar with the ups and downs of London publishing whom Rossetti knew. For a year or two my brother and I had an appointed weekly even- ing w^hen we called upon Major Campbell in his quiet lodgings in University Street, Tottenham Court Road ; and the time passed lightly and pleasantly over a cup of tea, with all sorts of talk, slight or serious, sensible or amusing ; our good-natured host assuming no air of stiffness or superiority on the score of age and varied experience, but chatting away with something which, as the months and years lengthened, partook even of deference for the foreseen intellectual initiative and eminence of Dante Rossetti. It was here that on one occasion we met by appointment, t« our great delec- tation, Ebenezer Jones, the author of Studies of Sen- sation and Event. I well remember that, at the instance of Calder Campbell, M// Sister's Sleep was produced to the editress of La Belle Assemhlee, a magazine of that date, 1847 or 18^8, which must have seen better days aforetime, but was then still tolerably well accepted in the regions of light literature. The editress certainly admired the poem, and perhaps she inserted it ; if so, this was the verj^ first appearance of Dante Rossetti in published print. My brother started on his foreign trip with Holman Hunt at the end of September ; and in a letter of the WRITINGS. 129 27th to the 29th of that month he sent me some poems written en route — London to Folkestone ; Boulogne Cliffs (which began '' The sea is in its listless chime/^ and is the first form of the lyric now named TIte Sea- limits), and Boulogne to Amiens and Paris. The first and third are snatches of blank verse, and are partly printed in my brother's Collected Works (1886), al- thoug-h not by himself at any period of his lifetime. On 4th October he wrote that, a day or two befi^re, while he was ascending the stairs of Notre Dame in Paris, a sonnet had come whole into his head, but had afterwards drifted away again. Four days later he sent me this sonnet, beginning "As one who groping in a narrow stair'''; also the sonnet On the Blace de la Bastille, and that For a Venetian Pastoral hy Giorgione (the picture in the Louvre), which had been written on the spot. There were two others in a grotesque strain, which remain unpublished, On the Louvre Gallery, and On a Cancan at the Salle Valentino, a dance which dis- gusted Rossetti not a little. In a letter of 18th October other verse followed : sonnets on a Last Visit to the Louvre ; three Last Sonnets in Paris ; the couple (pub- lished) For Riiggiero and Angelica hy Ingres ; some blank verse (partially printed in the Collected Works) From Paris to Brussels, On the Road, L' Envoi ; and again sonnets, On the Road to Waterloo, The Field of Waterloo, Return to Brussels ; and a lyric, Near Briissels, a Half- tvay Pause {Collected Works). He made the remark in this letter that, of all he had written since leaving London, only the two Ingres sonnets and the one On the Road to Waterloo had received any consideration : a remark which, when we take into account the calibre of B021- logne Cliffs and the Giorgione sonnet (not to speak of J 130 DANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTL some other items), shows that he was well capable of throwing- off good work at a heat. A letter dated from 2 1th to 2C)th October was sent also to our " Prteraphaelite Brother "" James Collinson. As Collinson did not make the mark which, in the early days of Priaeraphaelitism, his colleagues had hoped for, and as he is now perhaps nearly forgotten, I will here give a few words of information about him. He was a man of small stature, with a short neck, son of a book- seller at Mansfield in Nottinghamshire; of composed demeanour, retiring and modest. He was brought up in the Church of England, but got converted to the Church of E-ome by the influence of Dr. (Cardinal) Wiseman : a relapse to Anglicanism, and a reversion to Catholicism, ensued. As a re-converted Catholic, Col- linson became for a while exceedingly strict : he thought that the Prseraphaelite Brotherhood was a society more or less secular and latitudinarian, and this formed his prin- cipal, perhaps almost his sole, motive for seceding from it. He had begun art as a domestic painter, with sub- jects of the anecdotic or semi-humorous kind in low life j and save for one ambitious and in some respects very laudable '' Praeraphaelite " attempt, Sf. FAlza- hetk of llunrjnrij, he adhered in the main to this line of subject. He died towards ]i'iiitiug a volume of his original poems. On 1st March he sent to our mother various sonnets, which he described as " a lively band of bogies,'^ with other grotesque expressions to correspond. — i.e. (as one may understand the phrase), sonnets embodying painful thoughts, or fertile of grievous reminiscences. I presume that these were most probably the sonnets which he had then just printed in the Fortnightly Review, including the series of four named Willow-ivood. Mr. Browning, writino- to him about the same time, referred to this con- tribution. In jNIay ^Messrs. Smith & Elder sent him an account relating to the volume The Early Italian Poets, extend- ing up to the close of 1868. This account shows 593 copies sold, and 61 still on hand. The money realized was £108 lis. 8d., out of which a sum of £100 had been placed to ]\Ir. lluskin^s credit, while the balance, £8 lis. 8d., was due to Rossetti himself. A large WBITINOS. 147 proportion of copies, no fewer than 93, had been '^presented" to reviews and to private friends. The reference to Mv. Ruskin is not further defined : the natural assumption is that that gentleman had, with his wonted liberality, undertaken the expense of the printing- up to a limit of £100, with the proviso that he was to be reimbursed out of the sale. While the volume of TAe Earlij Italian Poets was waning, the project of the original poems was waxing, and by the middle of August it had reached the stage of an estimate, furnished by Mr. Strangeways, for the cost of printing such a volume. Proofs Avere obtained accordingly : the notion being in the first instance that of printing some old and some new poems for private circulation, and for service in a possible future published volume. My brother spent a considerable portion of this summer in the company of his old friend the painter and poet Mr. William Bell Scott, at Peukill Castle, near Girvan, Ayrshire, the seat of a lady of exceptional gifts of mind and cha- racter. Miss Boyd, to whom he was indebted, on more than one occasion, for salient evidences of amicable regard. On 21st August, writing from Penkill Castle, he sent me the proofs — such as they then stood — ■ of his poems, asking me to correct anything in them which might be obviously wrong, and to notify any points to which I might demur. The proofs included a very early composition named To Mary in Smnmer; the three sonnets entitled The Choice; and another called The Balljinch {^Mexwd^xd.?, Beauty and the Bird). All these Bossetti proposed to cut out : the only one, however, which remains finally unpublished is To Mary in Slimmer. As to inserting Ave (which some of my k3 148 BAXTE GABBIEL ROSSETTI. readers will remember as a semi-devotional address to the Madonna^ embodying in verse conceptions not un- like those of the early masters in paiuting) he had hesitated^ on the ground that it might lead — and in fact it has in some instances led — to definite miscon- ceptions regarding his ideas about Christian faith and dogma : he had, however, eventually decided to retain the poem — and few perhaps will contest that he did well in coming to this decision. He expressed an inclination to include the sonnet named N/fjjtial Sleep (or, as originally entitled, Vlacatd Venere), an item in the series The House of Life : an inclination which was carried into effect with a result the reverse of fortunate ; as the sonnet, when published, gave rise to severe strictures, on the justice of which I will not here offer any comment, and was ultimately with- drawn when the House of Life reached its completed form in 1881. My own opinion had been expressed in Auo'ust in favour of retaining the sonnet in print, so long as the collection remained unpublished : I at'terw^ards, and no doubt unwisely, withdrew this qualifying clause. ]\Iy brother had cancelled (though it was printed in the proofs) another sonnet termed On I lie French JAheration of Italy ; as this also, though alien in subject-matter from any possible question of sexual morals, dealt with its theme under a physical metaphor open to exception. Another item which was printed in the same form for private circulation was the ])rose tale Hand and Soul (originally published in T/ie Genu) : it was excluded from the volume, as ulti- mately issued in 1870. This is the printed Hand and Soul of which a moderate number of copies have got into circulation, and into booksellers' catalogues, since WRITINGS. 149 Rossetti^s death. One rather sanguine hookseller priced it at £6 Gs. ; whether he obtained his price is a question which I cannot determine, but as to which I shoukl remain sceptical in default of definite assurance. The interchange of letters between my brother and myself, as to the details of the privately-printed poems, went on at this time rather actively. On 2()th August he wrote discussing the metre of his Italian song " La bella donna ■'■' (in the Last Confession) ; to some laxities in which, as contrary to the scheme of Italian rhythm, I had started an objection. Soon afterwards he decided to cut out this song altogether ; but then again relented, and retained it. He proposed to omit a lyric named A Song and Music ; referred to his having added an opening stanza to Sister Helen, for clear- ness^ sake ; and expressed the opinion that, as Mr. Buxton Forman had recently, in an article in Tinsleifs Magazine, made mention of the early poem Mij Sister's Sleep, it would become a practical necessity to include this composition in the series, although contrary to my brother^s personal preference. Another very early poem was The Card-dealer ; which he modified, and inserted. On 14th September he apprised me that he had been sending to the printer seven new sonnets — including those on his own designs of Cassandra, The Fassover in the Holy Family, and Mary Magdalene at the Boor of Simon the Fharisee. He had also begun two new poems of greater length ; one of them being The Orchard-pit (of which he had then done little beyond a prose synopsis, and indeed it never proceeded much further), and the other being probably The Stream's Secret. Next day he expressed a doubt as to inserting the brace of sonnets on Ingres's picture of Ruggiero and LjU DAXTE GABRIEL BOSSETTL Angelica; finally it found grace in his eyes. By 21st September Rossetti had again written some more verse, including the ballad of Troj/ Town : " my best thing, I think/' was his comment upon this — but it does not follow that, when the glow of recent com- position had faded, he would have re-affirmed the same opinion. Other works of this period, which received the praise of Mr. Scott, were Eden Bower and the sonnet on T/ie Glen. Althouo-h Rossetti had in his hands several of his old poems, and was much in the vein for writing new ones, still a good number of the verses of past years, those which would be most needful for a volume taking the ordinary published form, remained as yet buried with his wife in Highgate Cemetery. He took the extreme resolution of having them vinburied. This is a fact which has Ijeen fi'equently stated ere now : I simply re-state it, and leave all my readers to judge for themselves whether the act was laudable, con- donable, or otherwise. His object manifestly was the desire of poetic fame, and reluctance that his light should be permanently hid under a bushel : the state of his feeling in relation to his deceased wife had no less manifestly undergone the calming and assuaging influence which comes with the passing of six years and upwards. The MSS. were recovered from the coffin, and were consigned to Dr. Llewellyn Williams, of No. 9 Leonard Place, Kennington, to be properly treated with disinfectants before further use could be made of them. This process was going on in the middle of the month of October, when Rossetti was either still at Penkill Castle, or just returned to London. On the :iilth of the month the papers were handed WRITINGS. 151 over to him. Four days before this he had written to me saying that he had always intended to dedicate to myself his first volume of poems^ and would now do so. Friends and acquaiiitances evinced an eager interest in the foi'thcoming volume. Thus Mr. Sidney Colvin suggested an order in which the poems might be printed^ differing from that which appears in the published book. Mr. Thursfield undertook to trace back, into its classic sources, the legend about Helen's vow to Aphrodite embodied in the poem of Troy Toivn, and he found it in Pliuy, but not in any earlier author; Mr. Swinbm-ne thanked Rossetti for some new sheets of the volume, and for the tale of Kami and Soul, which by this date (7 th December) had been definitely severed from the poems. He expressed also a wish (which was unfortunately not ratified) that Rossetti would take up and complete his other prose story of remote years, St. Agnes of Intercession ; and he referred to some new passages in the poem Jenny. 1870. A letter dated in February from ]\Ir. Patrick Park Alexander shows that Messrs. Blackwood had made an offer for publishing Rossetti's Poems. Mr. Alexander expressed regret that this offer had not been accepted. The publisher selected was (as is well known) Mr. F. S. Ellis, then settled as a bookseller in King Street, Covent Garden, little concerned in publishing : he afterwards published the works of Mr. William Morris, and some few others. My brother had, from first to last, the utmost reason for satisfaction in having come to terms with Mr. Ellis, who acted with 152 DANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTL consistent liberality and friendly zeal, and who relieved him from all trouble in the matter more onerous than that of receiving cheques for author^s royalty on sales, at punctual intervals. All my brother's subsequent publishing' was done with Mr. Ellis and his then partners in New Bond Street ; the reissue of T/ie Marly Italian Poets under the title Bante and his Circle ; the reissue in 1881, in a modified form, of the Poems of 1870; and the pubUcation, also in 1881, of the Ballads and Sonnets. In the letter from Mr. Alexander above mentioned another matter is also touched upon : he enclosed an old sonnet by Uossetti, speaking- of it as a ''vigorous imprecation." This must, I presume, have been the sonnet On a Mulberry-tree (planted by Shakespeare, and felled by the Rev. Mr. Gastrell) : it was published in 1881, but not in 1870. The volume made its appearance towards the end of April. My brother was sufficiently liberal of pre- sentation-copies to friends and acquaintances — not perhaps to any literary magnates who were not personally known to him. I find an acknowledgment of a copy from Sir Henry Taylor, whom Rossetti knew slightly, and whose stately historical drama of Philip van Artevelde had been read and re-read by him with fervent admiration at a very youthful ago; another from Sir Theodore Martin, who referred to the sonnet " This is that blessed Mary/' which he recollected from the date, 1819, when he had seen it printed to illustrate the picture of The Girlhood of Marji Virgin, as included in the Free Exhibition at Hyde Park Corner. A letter also came from Mr. Frank A. Marshall, whom my brother had known some years befoi'C, but had not seen recently : he asked WRITINGS. 153 permission to include A Last Confession in a reading- which he was to give in May in the Hanover Sqviare Rooms. Alfred Tennyson, well known to be a reluctant and scanty letter-writer, was not wholly silent upon this occasion : his epistle, however, appeared to Rossetti '' rather shabby " — which was a matter of opinion. The success of the book was rapid and conspicuous. As early as 3rd May Rossetti was able to announce that Mr. Ellis had sold the whole of the first issue of lOOU copies, with the exception of £00 (these also were exhausted towards 30th May or earlier), and was about to go to press again at once with a second 1000 ; 250 of the copies disposed of had been sent to America. As Mr. Ellis's liberal plan was to pay to the author, as soon as an edition or relay was in type, the stipulated royalty (one quarter of the published price of 13s. per copy), the two issues would have brought in to the author £300 in the space of less than a month; another £150 became due by the end of July. Rossetti remarked in the same letter that The Early Italian Poets, the publication of Messrs. Smith & Elder, was then just sold out, and that he would forthwith re- print it through Mr. Ellis, were the latter to assent. And this scheme was in fact carried out, but only after an interval of some three years. The idea was to make the edition in two volumes (and it seems that an advertisement appeared to this effect), with some additional matter. This was abandoned ; the arrange- ment of the contents was altered, and the title along- with that. If readers were numerous, reviewers also were lauda- tory. Who that read it can have forgotten the gorgeous stream of praise in which Mr. Swinburne indulged his 154 DANTE GABBIEL BOSSETTI. scenerous instincts as critic and as friend ? Another critique which Rossetti particuhxrly valued was that con- tributed to the Aflieiicmiii by Dr. Westland Marston, a very cordial acquaintance of more recent years. None of the reviews, however, impressed him more than one which appeared in an American paper, the Catholic World. He thoug-ht that its wi'iter had shown remark- able power of penetrating through the printed page into the essential and not wholly self-avowed personality of the author. Naturally he knew nothing either of the Catholic World, or of any person writing, or likely to be writino-, in its columns. The interest which he felt in the article was such as to impel him to make what enquiry he could after its author. He addressed him, I think, under cover to the editor of the paper, but without result. He also consulted a Catholic acquaint- ance — the poet Mr. Aubrey de Vere — who replied that he thought it possible the critic might be a Mr. Rudd. Nothing more definite, I believe, was ever ascertained on this point. A great literary event, followed by a great European event, gave a numbing shock to men^s minds in the summer of 1870. 0a 9th June Charles Dickens died ; and I recollect that my brother told me soon afterwards that the sale of his book seemed to have suffered a sudden decline in conse([uence. In the middle of the summer war was declared between France and Germany. The Poems hy Dante Gabriel Rossetti ran a bad chance when people who were just ceasing to talk about the author of PicJ>v:icJc and David Copperfield had to dis- cuss Napoleon III. and King William, Moltke and Mac- mahon, Gambetta and Bismarck, Emi)ire and Republic. Thus, from the early summer, Rossetti and his friends WRITINGS. 155 had little more to say about a run of purchasers, and a succession of re-issues ; and the book had the fate of most other books of moderate pretensions to popularity — sellinfj now and ag-ain with some tolerable des^ree of steadiness, far in the background from general interest and sensation. 1871. The ballad named Down. Stveam (originally The River's Record) seems to have been written towards July of this year; its local colouring clearly points to Kelm- scott. Soon afterwards Rossetti was invited, through Mr. Madox Brown, to contribute something to a maga- zine which had but a short lease of life — The Bark Blue. He authorized Mr. Brown to send Doion Stream, if so disposed. This was done, and the poem appeared in those pages in October, with the advantage of two woodcut illustrations from Brown^s hand. E-ossetti did about the same time " a few songs and sonnets ; " one of them was iu Italian, being, I suppose, the Barcarola which begins "Per carita.^^ This earned a word of encomium from Mr. Swinburne. The Cloud Confines (a short poem on which my brother not unnaturally Lxid considerable stress) also received Swinburne^s marked approval in the same letter. At Kelmscott likewise, towards this date, my brother began his rather long narrative poem of Rose Marij. Its first part was com- pleted by 10th September, and the remainder proceeded ra2)idly, being finished by the 23rd of the same month. The Sunset Wings, recording the arboreal evolutions of a flock of starlino's at Kelmscott, was done in Aug-ust. It was published in the Athena urn in the spring of 1873, and he then remarked in a letter " the description is 156 DANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTT. most exact/^ These details suffice to show that Rossetti, having- broug-ht out his volume^ was not a Httle inspirited towards continuous poetic production, which, unless in- terrupted by untoward circumstance, might probably have proceeded much farther than in fact it did. The untowai'd circumstance, however, was not to be wanting". It came in the shape of the article T//e Fleslily School of Poetry, written by Mr. Robert Buch- anan under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, and published in the Cotiteniporart/ Review. To this affair of The Fleshly School of Voetrij — an affair equally trumpery in itself and miserable in its consequences — I have made some reference aforetime, in my preface to the Collected Works of my brother. Suffice it here to say that Rossetti was in the first instance annoyed and partly amused — especially amused at the poor figure which the Contemporary ^ or its editor, or its contributor, or all three, cut in some newspaper correspondence of the time, wherein the authorship or pseudonymity of the article was shuffled over not a little; but in the sequel, when the same article, in an extended form, was republished as a pamphlet, he was unfortunately very much more annoyed, and not amused at all. On the contrary he foolishly and blameably took very much to heart this ill-conditioned attack,'^ with its many imputations or implications of low and bad moral tone in his writings, and of low and bad moral motives conducing to that tone ; and, instead of tossing the whole thing aside — the article or pamphlet into his " It is perfectly true — and I mention it to ]Mr. Buchanan's credit — that, after an interval of some years, he himself openly proclaimed that the attack was unjust and wrongful. If he thought so at that rather late date, it is no wonder if I do and always did tliink tlie same. WRITIXGS. 157 waste-paper basket, and its author into the limbo of unquiet spirits, actuated by some incentive or other to- wards detraction — he allowed a sense of unfair treat- ment, and a suspicion that the slur cast upon himself and his writings mig-ht be widely accepted as true, to eat into his very vitals, gravely altering- his tone of mind and character, his attitude towards the world, and his habits of life. Constant insomnia (beginning towards 1867), and its counteraction by reckless drugging with chloral, co-operated, no doubt, to the same disastrous end; indeed, I find it im))ossible to say Avhether the more potent factors in the case were insomnia and chloral which gave morbid virulence to outrag-ed feelino-s, or outraged feelings which jiromoted the persistence of insomnia, and the consequent abuse of chloral. All three had their share in making my brother a changed man from 1872 onwards. I am aware that in stating- these details (which have indeed been touched upon with more or less precision by other writers as well as by myself) I am exposing him to some censure for want of that masculine scorn or sturdy indifference which is the right answer to unmerited disparagement ; but the cause of truth would certainly not be served by my keeping strict silence either as to the unfairness of the attack, or as to the shock which was inflicted by it upon a nature too proud, too sensitive, and above all perhaps too isolated. In these remarks I have been anticipating somewhat, for (as already indicated) the publishing of the article in the Contemporary Review (as disting-uished from its subsequent re-issue as a pamphlet) was received by my brother light-heartedly enough. The first reference I find to this matter is in a letter which he addressed to 158 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTL me on 17th October, saying' that he — if Thomas Mait- land should turn out to be Robert Buchanan — would write and print a letter in answer to him. I replied dissuading, but without effect; and soon afterwards Rossetti^s article in the Athenceaiii, named The Stealthj/ School of Criticism, made its appearance. A letter from Mr. Swinburne, and another from Mr. J. T. Nettleship the painter (author of A Slndi/ of Browning), advert to this matter. From Mr. Colvin there is a letter regarding- a ballad of a burlesque kind which Rossetti wrote on the Buchanan affair. For this ballad Mr. Colvin tendered his good offices with the Fort nighty Revieiv, but he wisely recommended that the effusion should not be published at all, and my brother, ac- quiescing in this advice, proceeded no further. The MS. ballad is in my possession ; but is not likely ever to see the light of publication — not, at any rate, in my time. A letter from Mr. Ellis the publisher, dated 19th December, discloses another Rossettian move on the tarnished chessboard of the Fleshli/ School of Poetrif — he had written a letter to Mr, Buchanan, forming a separate pamphlet ; and this pamphlet, accord- ing to Mr, Ellis's letter, was then in proof. But the very next day a note from the junior partner in the then firm of Ellis & Green followed the missive of his senior. Mr. Green intimated that the pamphlet might probably be actionable as a libel, and no doubt any notion of publishing it must then have been finally abandoned. I never saw this pamphlet, nor I think any part of the MS. pertaining to it ; neither did 1 ever enquire whether perchance Mr, Ellis or his printer yet owns a copy of it. Were such the case, the pamphlet might yet some day prove a literary curiosity highly WBITINGS. 159 appetizing to some of those bibliographic zealots who are prompt with cheques for £7 or £10 in exchange even for a copy of Rossetti's boyish, privately printed, and insipid ballad, Sir Hugh the Heron. Whether the brochure really was a libel I have of course no means of judging ; nor whether it was more a libel on Mr. Buch- anan than the FlesJilf/ School of Poetri/, its predecessor, had been on Rossetti ; nor yet whether, if it toas more a libel as aforesaid, this was or was not dependent on the legal axiom, " The greater the truth, the greater the libel/^ My reader, who now knows as much about the pamphlet as \ do, may be left to his own conjectures. The year closes (8Uth December) with a business- announcement — Mr. Ellis writing to say that he would now advertize a sixth edition of the Poems ; this sixth edition being, in fact, the second five hundred out of a set of a thousand copies which had been printed some while previously. This amounts to six editions (but probably three or four of them were small ones, like this last-named) in a space of about twenty months ; not bad for poetry, as poetry rules in the market of the second half of the nineteenth century in England. 1872. Mr. Ellis resumes the correspondence of this year. On 24th January he sent Rossetti the modest sum of £2 16s. 2d., remitted by Messrs. Roberts Brothers from Boston as the author^s profit upon the American issue of the Poems (possibly this sum was only applicable to the half-year just expired, but I am unable to deter- mine that point). On 19th March he undertook to re- Y)rint The Parly Italian Poets at his own cost, on the 160 DANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTI. understanding' that any profit, beyond expenses re- couped, would be halved between himself and the author. The alarming illness from which my brother suffered in June of this year has been briefly mentioned on page 78. It was the result of the triple combination which I have just been discussing — insomnia, chloral, and the Fleshh/ School of Poefr// in its pamphlet form. The immediate cause was undoubtedly the pamphlet, which, working upon an excitable brain and overstrung feelings, betrayed Rossetti into the belief that he was fast be- coming the object of widespread calumny and obloquy, not less malignant and insidious than unprovoked and undeserved : — unprovoked, for he never intermixed in any literary or personal wrangles; and undeserved, for neither his poetry nor his painting was fairly chargeable with any sort of ignoble pruriency. As I have already said, my brother recruited his health by leaving London for the Scottish Highlands, and afterwards he settled down for some while at Kelmscott. The first record I find of renewed literary work is that on 7th November he sent me his Italian sonnet on his picture Proserpino. 1873 begins with a letter from Rossetti (January 2nd) saying that Mr. Ellis was then about to republish immediately The Earlij Ilalian Poets, long out of print. My brother asked me to attend to the proofs, which I did, commencing towards March, and forwarding to him each proof after revision. He dedicated to our mother this reissue, altering its title to Dante and hix Circle: the oriirinal book had been dedicated to his wife. The WBITING8. 161 volume was actually published in December. At the opening- of 1873 Mr. Ellis was also prepared to brins^ out a new volume of original poetry by Rossetti; but the latter hesitated whether to g-o to press at once with such verse as he had on hand, equal only to some 150 pages of print, or to wait until more should be done. Finally he adhered to the second alternative, and eight more years elapsed until, in 1881, he issued both the Ballads and Sonnets, and the partly reconstituted second form of the Poems of 1870. In February he sent to the Fortniglitly Review a critical notice of the new poetic volume. Parables avd Tales, by Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake. It may have been towards 1866 that my brother first made the personal acquaintance of Dr. Hake. They at once became fast friends, and the doctor gave ample testimony of this by his exceeding kindness and attention to my brother throughout the course of his illness in 1872. Though it was only in middle life that Rossetti knew Dr. Hake personally, he had, even in boyhood, felt a particular interest in some of his writings. There was a strans-e psychological romance published anonymously by Dr. Hake in 1840, in a very large and handsome form, with startling illustrations by Thomas Landseer. It was named Vates, or the Philosophij of Madness — or, in a later reissue, Valdarno, a colourless title which my brother viewed with regretful antipathy. Vates was read and re-read by Rossetti with great delight ; not, I suppose, so early as in the year of its publication, 1840, but more towards 1843 or 1844. After a long interval, perhaps about the year 1860, he wrote to ascertain the name of the unavowed author, and learned this to be Hake ; but Dr. Hake, I think, was then abroad, and L 162 DANTE GABBIEL BOB SETT I. some further j^ears passed before a direct acquaintance was possible. At last he presented himself in my brother's house in Cheyne Walk^ and the intimacy was established. In youth my brother had something of the same habit which was so marked in Shelley — that of writing at a venture to persons whose performances in the field of literature or of fine art he admired. I re- member that towards 1849 he addressed Leigh Hunt, sending some of his own verses^ and received a kind and encouraging letter in reply ; he wrote to Mr. W. B. Scott^ as the author of the poem Bosahell, and thus began a lifelong friendship ; to Ford Madox Brown, ex- pressing a great admiration of his art, and a hope that he might be permitted to obtain some artistic guidance from him — this also led to a friendship, the warmest, most intimate, and most continuous, of Rossetti^'s life ; to Robert Browning, to ask whether he had not rightly divined that great poet to be the auth(n- of Vauline. This may have been as early as 1848; for in and about that year my brother was greatly in the habit of haunt- ing the reading-room of the British Museum, and there perusing any poetic volumes which caught his fancy, and which he could not readily obtain otherwise. He lit upon Pauline ; not only read it through, but copied it all out ; recognized some lines which reappeared in some of Browning's acknowledged writings, and per- ceived moreover that the whole tone of the i^oem bespoke but one possible authorship; and he then ventured to ask his rather risk}^ question. Mr. Brown- ing was pleased to replv, and in the affirmative ; and this again commenced a friendly intercourse, frank and nleasant, continuing through many years, and only cur- tailed at last by the exceptionally, and indeed morbidly WRITINGS. 163 recluse habits of my brother in the closuig- period of his life. A project which was present to Rossetti^s mind from the beginning of 1873 was that of translating and editing the poems of Michelangelo. He got me to send to him at Kelmscott the noble edition of these poems by Giiasti, which had then been recently pub- lished, and which I possessed. This edition he studied to a certain extent; but press of other occupations, combined perhaps with some reluctance and procrastina- tion over the beginnings of so serious a task, diverted my brother from the project, and I have not fomid among his MSS. any trace of actual translation. The skilled and scholarly hand of Mr. Symonds performed not long afterwards the work which Rossetti left un- done ; and probably the English reader now possesses a more accurate and more comprehensively thought-out version of the poems than he could have obtained from Rossetti, although I not unnaturally regret that an undertaking which from some points of view was so peculiarly appropriate for my brother remained un- accomplished. A very small item of work which he performed in March was the revising, at the request of the Editor of Mauiider's TreaHurij, of the memoir of our father which apjjcars in that publication. In May he wrote a sonnet on the Spring — '^ the cold Spring, not yet warmed through,'' as he expressed it in a letter. 1874. A letter came on -iOth January from Dr. Franz Hueffer, saying that the Tauchnitz firm offered 4615 to l2 16i DAXTE GABEIEL ROSSETTL Rossetti for the right of including bis Poems in their renowned series of English reprints. Rossetti accepted these terms. The book appeared in that series soon afterwards^ with a critical preface by Dr. Hueffer — one of the ablest notices which the poetic work of Rossetti ever received. Dr. Hueffer^ who died rather suddenly in January 1889^ at the comparatively early age of forty-threC; was a German^ born in Munster, who, coming over to Loudon towards 1869, soon made ac- quaintance with Madox Brown, with Rossetti, and with various members of the same artistic and literary circle. He became a close family-connection of mine in 18 T^, when I married the half-sister of the lady, a daughter of Madox Brown, whom Hueffer himself had wedded in 187:2. Excluding from consideration a few men of powerful creative genius, I have known no person of more brilliant talents or of wider and more solid cultiva- tion than Hueffer : his range extended to philosophy, linguistics, literature, and music. He became the pioneer in England of the enthusiasm for the once much- belaboured Wagner, and for several years preceding his death he exerted, as musical critic of the Times, a power- ful influence over musical taste and enterprise not only in England but throughout the civilized world. In literature he was a man of rapid appreciation, and of catholic taste — which tended, however, with advancing years, to adhere more and more firmly to those great monuments of the past which form the standard of achievement. Soon after settling in England, where he acquired an early and exceptional mastery of the lan- guage, Hueffer anglicized himself as much as possible, and was eventually naturalized as a British subject ; and it may trul}- be said that England has now lost, in WRITINGS. 165 the German son of her adoption^ one of the most forcible and himinous of her critical minds. The letter from Dr. Hueffer to which I have al- ready referred, made mention of another subject besides that of the proposed Tauchnitz edition. He spoke of the translation which K-ossetti had made in early youth — towards 1847 — from the poem^ J)er Arme Heinrich, by the ancient German poet Hartmann von der Aue. Rossetti, as Hueffer reminded him^ had recently thought of publishing the translation^ along" with an introduc- tion to be written by his German friend. This hint^ however^ led to no practical result ; and the translation from J)er Anne Heiurich remained unpublished until I included it;, in 1886^ in my brotlier^s Collected Works. In February Rossetti sent to our mother the sonnet on Winter, then lately written. Soon afterwards the sonnet on Proserpina, in its Italian form^ was discussed with our sister Maria. She agreed with the author in preferring the Italian to the English version. In October, in consequence of my having compiled and prefaced the Aldine Edition of the Poems of Wil- liam Blakcj some reference appeared in print to the manner in which those iwems of his which were included in Gilchrist^s Life of Blake in 1863 had been edited — • the writer attributing to myself, as well as to my brother, the rather liberal latitude of editorial revision and adjustment l)y which the treatment of the verses had been marked. My brother, in writing to me on the subject, justly took upon himself the sole resjDonsibility for what had in that instance been done ; and he added — and here again I could not but concur with him — that he would not now, if the work were before him to be done, make so many alterations. 166 DANTE GABRIEL BOSSETTI. The death o£ Oliver Madox Brown, at the age of nineteen, took phice on November 5th 1874. Rossetti, who had now^ resettled in London after a long sojourn at Kelmscott, was among the most earnest believers in the genius of which this extraordinary youth had given evidence both in painting and in literature. He wrote a sonnet expressing his sense of the calamity ; and pro- posed to me (12th November) to publish it, with the consent of the bereaved father, in the Athenmun. This was done without delay. In the last month of the year Rossetti was proposing to write for the Fortuiglitljj Review a critique on a recent volume of poems, Neio Symbols, by his friend Dr. Hake. For some reason which I do not now remember this project miscarried. 1877. In January of this year two references occur to musical settings of some of Rossetti's ])oems. Mr. Moncure D. Conway wrote that he had been hearing- Mr. Dannreuther's music to Rossetti's Autmm Song — a very early performance which was not included in any one of the volumes published during its author's life- time. ]Mrs. Florence Marshall addressed Rossetti, ob- serving that, about six years before, he had authorized her to publish music to his lyric, A Little While ; and she wished now to do the same for A New Year's Burden — Messrs. Novello being the publishers. The sonnet Asfarte Syrinca is referred to in a letter of 23rd :Marcli from Mrs. Fry, wife of the gentle- man who bad purchased the picture which the sonnet illustrates. WHITINGS. 167 1878. Mr. Niles^ representing* the American publishing firm of Roberts Brothers, wrote to Rossetti in February, saying- that the American edition of the Poems had then long been out of print, and the firm were now selling imported copies of the English edition. He expected soon to print a new American issue of the work. Probably the first poem by Rossetti which appeared in a foreign translation was the Last Confession. In July Signor Luigi Gamberale sent over from Italy to the author his Italian version of the poem in question, entitled JJii' Ulfiiiia Coiifessioue. It will easily be understood that this composition, which embodies a story partly (though only subordinately) related to the Italian revolutionaiy movements which preceded the attainment of national unity, appealed with esj)ecial force to an Italian heart and imagination. Another book was issued by Gamberale in. 1881, also inclu- ding some translations from Rossetti — Poeti Inglesi e TedescJd : Jennij is one of the poems here translated. Two letters of the later part of the year refer to some minor writings by Rossetti, of a date not then recent. One is from Mr. Richard Hearne Shepherd, who said that his pamphlet upon Ebenezer Jones, the author of Studies of Sensation and Event, had been mainly suggested by a little notice of this poet which my brother had published in Notes and Queries in February 1870. The other letter is from Mrs. Heaton (the biographer of Albert Durer), who asked permission to reprint, in a memoir of Maclise, Rossetti's description, printed in the Acadeniij in April 1871, of the series of 168 DANTE GABEIEL BOSSETTL portraits which Maclise had of old contributed to Fraser's Magazine. She also projiosed to quote Ros- setti^s ''eloquent words ^' concerning' the great works of Maclise in the Houses of Parliament, the Waterloo and Trafalgar. Mr. Turner, the purchaser of my brother's painting A Vision of Fiammctta, wrote on 5th October, referring to the sonnet illustrating that work which had on the same day been published in the Atlieiueiim. Nearly at the same time, 16th October, Mr. Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet, acknowledged the receipt of the sonnet addressed to himself — " Sweet poet, thou of whom these years that roll." A letter from Mr. Theodore Watts must also, I suppose, belong to this same year, 1878; which was the year when, as a sequel of the Berlin Conference, England came into administrative possession of the Isle of Cyprus. Mr. Watts wrote that he had sent to the Athencenm some lines by liossetti, presumably a sonnet, regarding Cyprus, but had afterwards withdrawn tliem, upon finding that the Pall Mall Gazette contained some ' other lines on the like subject. I know nothing further of Rossetti's composition, which has never seen the light of i)ublicatiun. Perhaps neither Mr. Watts, nor even- tually the author himself, deemed it a success. It can- not, I think, have been a very genuine inspiration ; for neither the fact that England was to relieve the "un- speakable Turk-" from mal-administering Cyprus, nor i\ie2)resfige hence accruing to Lord Beaconsfield, was an event much in his aroove. WRITINGS. 169 1879. In January Mr. David Main, the Glasgow book- seller, who shortly afterwards brought out a well-selected volume of sonnets (the first-fruits of a veritable sonnet- mania, which has erupted in a number of subsequent volumes), wrote to my brother, asking leave to include in his compilation two specimens from the Foems of 1870 — Broken Music and Lost Bays. Various letters were afterwards interchanged between Main and Ros- setti, who expressed his assent. In June Mr. Eaton Faning sought permission for setting to music the lyric A New Year's Burden — the same composition which had been previously named for a like purpose by Mrs. Marshall ; and a similar request came from Mr. T. Anderton in December of the ensuing year. 1880. Rossetti^s sonnet on The Sonnet, which now forms a proem to The House of Life, must have been written early in this year. Mr. Hall Caine, with whom he was then carrying on a very active correspondence, princi- pally on literary matters, acknowledged on 24th February the receipt of the MS. Soon afterwards some alterna- tive endings were discussed with our sister Christina ; prior to the presentation (as mentioned on p. Ill) of this sonnet, with its decorative adjuncts, as a birthday- present to our mother. It was inserted in front of a copy of Mr. Main's sonnet-book. In another of his numerous letters (March) Mr. Caine refers to a statement, recently made by Rossetti, that he had been writing some additions to the ballad of Sister 170 DANTE GABRIEL B0S8ETTI. Helen, and a sonnet on Keats — tLe same which appears printed in the Ballads and Sonnets of 18S1. The histori(?al ballad of The JFhite Ship was com- posed mainly, if not wholly, in 1880 ; it was in progress during the April of that year. My brother sent the MS. to ]\[adox Brown, then living- in ^Manchester ; observing that every point in his treatment of the subject, even down to the incident of the '' fair boy dressed in black " who is put forward by the panic-stricken courtiers to announce to King Henry I. the terrible news of his son's death, was derived from the ancient chroniclers. Mr. Brown, who in his youth had known something of naval matters, replied, making various remarks bearing upon the phraseology of the ballad in this respect, and in others as well. Rossetti thanked him for his " most valuable nautical hints,^' and undertook to adopt some of them. Undoubtedly he required a little guidance of that sort in any point approaching even distantly to the technique of sea-craft; being one of those men to whom such Avords as sea, ship, and boat, are generic terms, admitting of little specific, and still less of any individual and detailed, distinction. Another work which occupied m}^ brother in the Spring of 1880 was that of writing, for the new edition brought out in that year, some additions to what he had done many years before for the Life of Blake by Gilchrist. The added matter was chiefly confined to some observations upon certain of the more grotesque aspects of the "■ prophetic book,^' Jerusalem : but besides this my brother entered freely into communication with Mrs. Gilchrist upon various subsidiary points — illustra- tions, Blake^s letters, &c. The sonnet on Blake and the one on Chatterto)i were both written towards May ; WRITINGS. 171 that on Coleridge towards July ; and near the close of the year Pride of Youth, which finds a place in The House of Life. 1881. Two other sonnets claim mention here — both written probably in January. One is that named Tiber, Nile, and Thames — which ag-ain refers to Chatterton and Coleridge^ and also to Keats ; the other is Michelangelo's Kiss, inserted in The House of Life. My brother sent them both to our sister Christina, accompanied by the ominous words, " With me, sonnets mean insomnia/' The long- ballad -poem of The' King's Tragedy was in progress towards the same time, and may have been finished before Spring had fairly begun. He was at much pains (but not with definite success) to ascertain on what authority the name Barlass had been applied to Catharine Douglas, the supposed narrator of this story ; and he beat about a good deal for a suitable title for the ballad before pitching upon the one which he finally selected ; he also proposed to me, but soon with- drew. Be raid's St or;/, as a substitute for the name of The White Ship. Another sonnet was that upon Czar Alexander the Second, slaughtered in March : a copy of it was sent to Mr. Caine. I think the trio of sonnets in The House of Life, named True Woman, must have been written at a yet later date ; in that case they may be the last sonnets which my brother produced in 1881, and the last which have appeared in type. In writing to our mother on 15th September he spoke of them as written '' quite lately."'' When the two ballads had been completed, and when The House of Life had been compiled into the shape 172 DANTE GABRIEL B0S8ETTI. which it now bears, Rossetti made up his mind to defer no longer the pviblication of a second volume : the one which bears the title of Ballads and Bonnets. The entire MS. for the book appears to have been consigned to the printer before the end of March. The volume of 1870, Poems, had now for a considerable while been out of print. One portion of its contents — i.e., those sonnets which had been printed in it as a part of the then vincompleted House of Life — was transferred to the Ballads, and Sonnets. Rossetti thought the present a convenient opportunity for reissuing the Poems, slightly moditied : so he filled up — principally by inserting the early and unfinished narrative poem named The Bride's Prelude — the gap left in that volume by the removal of the sonnets in question ; and he set the printer to work upon a reprint, thus modified^ of the Poems, as well as upon the new volume. Ballads and Sonnets. His attendino- to this matter in 1881 turned out to be a fortunate circumstance, for Destiny had determined that he should hardly survive the close of that year. The publishing firm of ElHs & White renewed, for the Ballads and Sonnets, the same liberal terms which had been settled for the Poems of 1870 : the author's royalty of 35 per cent, was to be paid down in full as soon as the volume should be published. For the reissued Poems the terms were slightly altered : payment of a like royalty half-yearly^ according to the number of copies sold. By the middle of May my brother notified that he would send the proofs of the Ballads and Sonnets for me to revise. He himself, in this as in all other instances, attended also diligently to the same matter. In June Mr. Valpy — the gentleman frequently men- tioned in the first section of this book as a purchaser WRITINGS. 173 of Rossetti^s pictures and designs — wrote to him that he was getting- up a catalogue of the paintings in his possession by Samuel Palmer; and asked permission to print in that pamphlet some remarks on the paintings contained in a letter which Rossetti had written to him : this was soon afterwards done. Both the poetic volumes were published towards the middle of September. In October the publishers sent Rossetti £150 (reduced by the cost of cancels &c. to £136) as the royalty for the first 1000 copies of Ballads and Sonnets. This was followed in November bj' another payment of £112 for 750 copies. The total munber published up to that date had been 3000 ; out of these, £50 had been despatched to the publishing firm of Messrs. Roberts in America. My brother was very desirous of adding, to the two historical ballads {Tke White S/iip and T//e Kind's Tfugedy) which appear in his volume, a third historical ballad on the great subject of Joan of Arc. He had not been willing to delay the publication of his book until he might find leisure for dealing with this arduous theme ; but his mind was seriously bent upon it, as probably the most important thing which he was likely henceforth to undertake. A letter from Mr. Shields, dated 37th September, relates to this matter. He says that a very cultivated lady of his acquaintance, Miss Bradford, was then occupied in some researches at the British Museum, for which Rossetti had commissioned her, on the subject of Joan of Arc ; and in fact various transcripts and abstracts, made by Miss Bradford, were in my brother's hands at the date of his death. The year closes (5th December) with a request from Miss Cecile Hartog, readily granted, to be allowed to 174 DANTE GABEIEL R0S8ETTI. publish the innsic which she had composed to the lyrie^ T//ree Shadows. This lady is the sister of one who married the distinguished philologist in Hebrew and Old-French, Arsene Darmesteter, brother of Professor James Darmesteter, who in 1888 became the husband of one of the choicest of oiir English poetesses, Miss Mary Robinson. I dwell upon this association of names with peculiar pleasure ; as Miss Robinson (numbered among my most valued friends of recent years, but not per- sonall}^ acquainted with my brother) was almost the first writer who, after his death, published a record of him — a very sympathetic record, full of delicate intel- lectual insight and of womanly charm : it appeared in 1882 in the pages of Harper's Monilihj Magazine. 1882. In January another minor payment, £58, came from the publishers, being the balance due upon the volume Foems up to the close of iSSl. Messrs. Roberts also sent a small sum. They had printed in America lOUU copies of the BaMads and Sonnets, and were then engaged, in stereotyping the volume Poems in its new form. About this time Messrs. Kegan Paul & Co. were compiling their book of Selections from living British Poets. They wished to include, as specimens of my brother's work. Sister Helen, Eden Bower, The Sony of the Bower, and a sonnet or two. To this my brother — who had recently authorized the Rev. Mr. Langridge to make some other reprint — entertained no objection. The publishers, however, were not unnaturally reluctant to' assent to so large a contribution. As the volume did not actually appear until after my brother's death, and as its scope extended only to poets living at the date of WniTIXGS. 175 pu])lieation, it does not in fact inclnde anything by Rossetti. The two last letters in my store come appropriately from Mr. Theodore Watts^ the friend whose keenness of intellectual sympathy, and assiduity of personal friend- ship, did so much to console the despondency of his closing years, and to smoothe the unreposeful pillow to which at length rest came along with death. On 10th March my brother was already at Birchington-on-Sea, tended by our mother and our sister Christina, Mr. Hall Caine being also in his company. Mr. Watts then wrote to say that the publishers were about to print some further copies of the Ballach and Sonnets j and on the 16th he wrote again, observing that he supposed Rossetti was getting on with The Dutchnan's Pij)c. This indicates that Rossetti was still active with mind and pen up to almost the last twilight of his life ; for the letter was written only twenty-four days befoi-e the date of his death, 9th April. T/ie Dutchman's Pipe sounds not very much like the title of a Rossettian poem. The fact is however that at a very early period — pei'haps in 1847, or when he was about nineteen years of age — my brother wrote the great majority of a ballad, of a grotesque character not unmingled with horror, about a smoking Dutchman and the devil, founded upon a prose story which he and I had read some years before in a periodical named Tales of Chivalry/ ; and in his last illness he recurred to and completed this ballad. Here I close the brief and imperfect record of my brother's work : a record which could not but rekindle in my mind many vivid, many tender, and some painful memories of olden and of later y^ears. PARAPHRASE OF THE HOUSE OF LIFE. M THE HOUSE OF LIFE. A PROSE PARAPHRA.se. I have more than once been told that the verses by my brother which compose (as he termed it) "a Sonnet-sequence/'' under the aggregate title of The House of Life, are very difficult of interpretation. Not long ago one of his most intimate friends j^ut it to me pointedly in the phrase ''They cannot be understood. •'■' I should like them to be understood ; and, as I appear to myself to understand the great majority of their bulk and contents, I have thought it not inconsistent with re- spect to my brother^s memory, and with a desire to extend the right estimate of his writings, that I should take it upon me to expound their meaning. This I have done in the form of a paraphrase in ^vose : following at no very great distance the actual diction of the sonnets, but amplifying here, and interpolating there, and from time to time commenting or discussing. The reader who goes through my paraphrase will, I think, acquit me of any attempt to " puff my brother " : the expressions of critical opinion are of the fewest, and, such as they are, they scarcely bear any character of direct eulogy. The view which I express of the meaning of the sonnets must be taken as simply my own view. I hardly think that my brother ever explained to me, or debated with me, the meaning of any one of them. He and I M 2 180 DANTE GABBIEL B0S8ETTI. were wont to assume that there was between us a certain community of jDerception which would enable me to understand what he wrote, either immediately and with- out close scrutiny of the details, or at any rate in the event of my applying myself seriously to a consideration of the written page. Most of the sonnets of T//e House of Life have naturally been familiar to me from an early date after they were composed. It is only now, however, and with a view to the present para})hrase, that I have weighed them minutely, line by line, phrase by phrase, and in the sum-total of each composition. This I have done with close and deliberate attention, and the result is before the reader. As might have been ex- pected, I found that several things which I had hitherto regarded with vague and inexpress acquiescence, neither analysing nor pausing over them, were in fact charged with some particular significance, be it valuable or the reverse ; and on the whole I now see more clearly than I ever did before the purjwrt of the Sonnets, and whether that pur^wrt is important or unimportant. Some while after I had begun this paraphrase I hap- pened to be talking about it with INIr. Charles Fairfax Murray the painter, who saw a great deal of my brother at times, from about 1867 onwards; and I was pleased to learn from him that my brother had on one occasion expressed a certain inclination to write and publish some sort of exposition of The House of Lf'. But it was not at all in his line to set-to actually at such a task. No doubt he would never have done so, how- ever long he might have lived ; yet the fact that he had thought of it, as a thing not wholly foreign to his per- sonal and literary liking, has made me view my own undertaking vvith the less mistrust. THE HOU^E OF LIFE. 181 I am aware that a prose paraphrase ofc' poetry — and especially of poetry abstract in thought and ornate in structure, such as is I'requent in T/ie House of l^ife — is not only a prose performance, but a prosaic perform- ance ; unalluring to any reader, distasteful, or even in- tolerable and degrading-, in the eyes of some readers. I know that what I have written iu my paraphrase looks meagre and jejune ; and that even the very words of the sonnets, transcribed verbatim, produce here a dulled and crippled effect. But, as I never expected to view my paraphrase with any feeling of self-applause, so I shall not be disconcerted by any censure which may be applied to its form or diction : content if some persons who are disposed to study Rossetti^s poetry in an earnest and confiding spirit find that, after perusing the para- phi-ase, they ap])rehcnd the scope and meaning of the s