Letters of D. G. Rossetti: I. 1854

LIFE seems to me strangely varied this sunny January day, as, sitting at my desk in the parlor of a pleasant villa on the outskirts of the little town of Alassio, I look beneath palm-trees upon the blue waters of the Mediterranean, and listen to the measured beat of the waves on the sandy shore. Lying open before me are copies of the letters which Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to his friend William Allingham. In the table drawer are copies of another set of letters, which, more than a century and a half ago, Swift wrote to an Irish country gentleman. This double correspondence, written by men wide as the poles asunder, I have brought from England to edit in Italy for readers on the other side of the Atlantic. Have I not good reason for finding a strange variety in life ?

Delightful as is this spot where winter seems to have gone a-maying, yet it better suits a poet or a painter than an editor, who needs long shelves of books far more than trees laden with oranges and bushes weighed down with roses. From England and libraries I have been driven far away by weakness of health. In editing Rossetti’s letters — that part of my twofold task to which I have turned first — I have had the help of friends at home. Mr. W. M. Rossetti has read the whole of the correspondence, and has furnished me with elucidatory notes. These are indicated in each case by the addition of his initials, to distinguish them from the passages which I quote from his interesting Letters and Memoir of his brother. My old friend Mr. Arthur Hughes, who, though not one of the seven Preraphaelite Brothers, lived in great intimacy with many of them, has let me draw on his reminiscences. More than forty years ago he was painting in Rossetti’s studio ; his hand, happily, has lost none of its exquisite skill. Mrs. Allingham, whose pictures of English cottages are not Surpassed in refinement and in beauty by the best of her husband’s verses, enables me to give a brief sketch of that graceful poet’s uneventful life. He had made some beginning in writing his autobiography. From what he had written she sends me a few extracts. Some day, I am told, a memoir of him will be published. It will be delightful indeed if it contains the full records he kept of his long talks with Tennyson and Carlyle. Of Carlyle he saw much more than most of that great man’s friends, for during some years scarcely a week went by in which they did not walk together. Strange to say, this intimacy has been passed over in total silence by Mr. Fronde. In the four volumes of his hero’s Life there are sins of omission as well as of admission.

William Allingham was born at Ballyshannon, County Donegal, in March, 1824, of a good stock, for he was sprung from one of Cromwell’s settlers. Of Ballyshannon he gives the following description : “ The little old town where I was born has a voice of its own, low, solemn, persistent, humming through the air day and night, summer and winter. Whenever I think of that town I seem to hear the voice. The river which makes it rolls over rocky ledges into the tide. Before spreads a great ocean in sunshine or storm ; behind stretches a manyislanded lake. On the south runs a wavy line of blue mountains ; and on the north, over green, rocky hills rise peaks of a more distant range. The trees hide in glens or cluster near the river ; gray rocks and boulders lie scattered about the windy pastures. The sky arches wide over all, giving room to multitudes of stars by night, and long processions of clouds blown from the sea, but also, in the childish memory where these pictures live, to deeps of celestial blue in the endless days of summer. An odd, out-of-the-way little town, ours, on the extreme western verge of Europe ; our next neighbors, sunset way, being citizens of the great new republic, which indeed, to our imagination, seemed little, if at all, farther off than England in the opposite direction.”

Of the cottage in which he spent most of his childhood and youth he writes : “Opposite the hall door a good-sized walnut-tree leaned its wrinkled stem towards the house, and brushed some of the second-story panes with its broad fragrant leaves. To sit at that little upper window when it was open to a summer twilight, and the great tree rustled gently, and sent one leafy spray so far that it even touched my face, was an enchantment beyond all telling. Killarney, Switzerland, Venice, could not, in later life, come near it. On three sides the cottage looked on flowers and branches, which I count as one of the fortunate chances of my childhood ; the sense of natural beauty thus receiving its due share of nourishment, and of a kind suitable to those early years.”

Allingham’s schooling was far too brief to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. He was scarcely fourteen, if indeed quite so old, when he was placed as a clerk in the town bank, of which his father was manager. The books which he had to keep for the next seven years were not those on which his heart was set. He was a great reader. Year after year he kept adding to the scanty stock of learning which he had brought from school, till in the end he had mastered Greek, Latin, French, and German. His father, proud though he was of his son’s intelligence, had little sympathy with his constant craving for knowledge. In the bank manager’s eyes, it was not the scholar, but the thorough business man who ranked highest. From the counting-house the young poet at last succeeded in escaping. “ Heartsick of more than seven years of bankclerking, I found a door suddenly opened, not into an ideal region or anything like one, but at least into a roadway of life somewhat less narrow and tedious than that in which I was plodding.” A place had been found for him in the customs, as it was found for another and a greater dreamer on the other side of the Atlantic.

“ In the spring of 1846 I gladly took leave forever of discount ledgers and current accounts, and went to Belfast for two months’ instruction in the duties of Principal Coast Officer of Customs, a tolerably well-sounding title, but which carried with it a salary of but £80 a year. I trudged daily about the docks and timber-yards, learning to measure logs, piles of planks, and, more troublesome, ships for tonnage ; indoors, part of the time practiced customs bookkeeping, and talked to the clerks about literature and poetry in a way that excited some astonishment, but on the whole, as I found at parting, a certain degree of curiosity and respect. I preached Tennyson to them. My spare time was mostly spent in reading and haunting booksellers’ shops, where, I venture to say, I laid out a good deal more than most people, in proportion to my income, and managed to get glimpses of many books which I could not afford or did not care to buy. I enjoyed my new position, on the whole, without analysis, as a great improvement on the bank ; and for the rest, my inner mind was brimful of love and poetry, and usually all external things appeared trivial save in their relation to it. Yet I am reminded by old memoranda that there were sometimes overclouding anxieties : sometimes, but not very frequently, from lack of money ; more often from longing for culture, conversation, opportunity; oftenest from fear of a sudden development of some form of lung disease, the seeds of which I supposed to be sown in my bodily constitution.” This weakness he outgrew.

Having gone through his apprenticeship, he returned to Donegal, where he was stationed for some years. Close to his office he had a back room, where he kept all his books and where he read for hours together. Here, no doubt, he covered many a sheet of paper with verse. From Mr. Arthur Hughes I have the following account of the young poet: —

“ D. G. R., and I think W. A. himself, told me, in the early days of our acquaintance, how, in remote Ballyshannon, where he was a clerk in the customs, in evening walks he would hear the Irish girls at their cottage doors singing old ballads, which he would pick up. If they were broken or incomplete, he would add to them or finish them ; if they were improper, he would refine them. He could not get them sung till he got the Dublin ‘ Catnach of that day to print them, on long strips of blue paper, like old songs ; and if about the sea, with the old rough woodcut of a ship on the top. He either gave them away or they were sold in the neighborhood. Then, in his evening walks, he had at last the pleasure of hearing some of his own ballads sung at the cottage doors by the crooning lasses, who were quite unaware that it was the author who was passing by.”

He liked, his widow tells me, to see all sorts of people and all sides of life. He knew every cottage for twenty miles round Ballyshannon. When she visited the place with their children, after his death, “ very many,” she writes, “ were the friendly greetings we had from folk who remembered him kindly.” He sought for sympathy outside the narrow limits of this secluded spot. “ I had,” he says, “ for literary correspondents, Leigh Hunt, George Gilfillan, and Samuel Ferguson, and for love correspondent F. [one of his cousins], whose handwriting always sent a thrill through me at the first glance and the fiftieth perusal.” In June, 1847, he paid his first visit to London, and called on Leigh Hunt.

“I was shown into his study, and had some minutes to look round at the bookcases, busts, old framed engravings, and to glance at some of the books on the table, diligently marked and noted in the well-known neatest of handwritings. Outside the window climbed a hop on its trellis. The door opened, and in came the genius loci, a tallish young old man, in dark dressing-gown and wide turneddown shirt collar, his copious iron-gray hair falling almost to the shoulders. The friendly brown eyes, a simple yet finetoned voice, easy hand-pressure, gave me greeting as to one already well known to him. Our talk fell first on reason and instinct. He maintained (for argument’s sake, I thought) that beasts may be equal or superior to men. He has a light earnestness of manner, a toleration for almost every possible different view from his own. I ask him about certain highly interesting men. Dickens, a pleasant fellow, very busy now, lives in an old house in Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone. Carlyle, I know him well. Browning lives at Peckham, because no one else does ! He’s a pleasant fellow, has few readers, and will be glad to find that you admire him (!!).

“In 1850 I ventured to send my first volume of verse to Tennyson. I don’t think he wrote to me, but I heard incidentally that he thought well of it; and during a subsequent visit to London (in 1852, perhaps) Coventry Patmore, to my boundless joy, proposed to take me to call on the great poet, then not long married, and living at Twickenham. We were admitted, shown upstairs, and soon a tall and swarthy man came in, with loose dark hair and beard, very nearsighted ; shook hands cordially, yet with a profound quietude of manner; immediately afterwards asked us to stay to dine. I stayed. He took up my volume of poems, which bore tokens of much usage, saying, ‘You can see it has been read a good deal!’ Then, turning the pages, he asked, ‘ Do you dislike to hear your own things read?’ and receiving a respectfully encouraging reply, read two of the Æolian Harps. The rich, slow, solemn chant of his voice glorified the little poems.”

These two poems, which are included in Allingham’s Day and Night Songs, are mentioned by Rossetti in one of his letters as among his favorites. He too glorified his friend’s verse by his recitation. “ I remember,” writes Mr. Hughes, “ before I knew Allingham, Rossetti speaking of him to me and of his poems, and reciting as he only could The Ruined Chapel, beginning : —

He was the most splendid reciter of poetry, deep, full, mellow, rich, so full of the merits of the poem and its music.” Nevertheless, his recitation, fine though it was, must have been marred by one great defect: the man who made “ calm ” rhyme with “arm” had no ear for one of the most beautiful sounds in the English language. Tennyson, to whom in early years he sent some of his poems in manuscript, found fault with these “ cockney rhymes,” though he himself had been guilty of them, and guilty of them in print. In the first version of The Lady of Shalott “river” rhymes with “ lira.”

As years went by, Allingham saw much more of the world and of those men of letters whose society he loved. In the course of his official duties, he was moved first to one station, and then to another, in England. Twice he had an appointment in London. In 1870 he retired from the customs, being appointed sub-editor of Fraser’s Magazine under Froude. He Succeeded him as chief editor in 1874. In the Same year he married. He died in 1889.

In printing these letters I have omitted much as being only of passing interest. A few passages have been struck out which might, it was thought, give pain either to those criticised by Rossetti or to their surviving friends; although, were J to print the whole of the correspondence, little fault could be found with it on the score of severity. In these letters, at all events, the writer was not often harsh in his judgment of his fellow-men. It is time, however, to bring this introduction to a close, and allow Rossetti to begin to speak for himself.

I.

26 April, 1854.

MY DEAR ALLINGHAM. — We lost my father to-day at half past five. He had not, I think, felt much pain this day or two, but it has been a wearisome, protracted state of dull suffering, from which we cannot but feel in some sort happy at seeing him released.

I shall call on you soon, and meanwhile and ever am yours sincerely,

D. G. ROSSETTI.

Will you tell Mrs. Howitt, should you see her?

Dante Rossetti, a year before his father’s death, sketched the old man as he sat at his desk deep in study. This striking likeness is reproduced in the Letters and Memoir. The son of an Italian blacksmith, early in life Gabriel Rossetti showed that he had that double gift by which his own son was to become famous. The painter’s art, however, he neglected for poetry. His love of freedom, under the despotic Bourbons, brought his life into danger. After lying hid in Naples for three months of the spring of 1821, he escaped to Malta on an English manof-war. There he was befriended by that witty versifier, Hookham Frere. “One of my vivid reminiscences,” writes his son William, “ is of the day when the death of Frere was announced to him, in 1846. With tears in his half-sightless eyes and the passionate fervor of a southern Italian, my father fell on his knees and exclaimed, ‘Anima bella, benedetta sii tu, dovunque sei! ’ (Noble soul, blessed be thou wherever thou art! )” He settled in London, where he supported himself by teaching Italian. With all the fervor of a poet and the enthusiasm of an exiled patriot, he was, like Mazzini, a man of the strictest conduct. By hard work and thrift, aided by an excellent wife, he always kept his family in decent comfort, and never owed a penny to any man. “ He put his heart into whatever he did.” His learning was great, though his application of it was often fanciful. In the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance he found far deeper meanings than had ever been dreamed of by the authors. As the little Dante looked over the woodcuts of some old volume, he would be awed by his father’s declaration that it was a libro sommamente mistico,— a book in the highest degree mystical. Free-thinker though he was, nevertheless “for the moral and spiritual aspects of the Christian religion he had the deepest respect. ” In his early years he had been a famous improvisatore. Throughout life he was great in declamation and recitation. If on one side of his character he affected his son by sympathy, on another side he no less affected him by a spirit of antagonism. Of politics he and his brothers in exile talked far too much for the young painter. Of gli Austriaci (the Austrians) and Luigi Filippo (Louis Philippe) Dante Rossetti heard so much in his youth that he seems to have registered a vow “ that he, at least, would leave Luigi Filippo and the other potentates of Europe and their ministers to take care of themselves.” At all events, for the whole of his life, as regards current politics, he was a second Gallio, — he “ cared for none of those things.”

The old man bore his banishment the more easily “ as he liked most things English, — the national and individual liberty, the constitution, the people and their moral tone, — though the British leaven of social Toryism was far from being to his taste. He also took very kindly to the English coal fires. He would jocularly speak of ‘buying his climate at the coal merchant’s.’ ” Paralysis struck him in his closing years. Nevertheless, “ he continued diligent in reading and writing almost to the last day of his life. His sufferings (often severe) were borne with patience and courage (he had an ample stock of both qualities), though not with that unemotional calm which would have been foreign to his Italian nature. He died firm - minded and placid, and glad to be released, in the presence of all his family.”

II.

HASTINGS, Monday, 26 June, 1854.

. . . Perhaps you heard that I called on you with the mighty MacCracken, who was in town for a few days, but we did not find you. What do you think of Mac coming to town on purpose to sell his Hunt, his Millais, his Brown, his Hughes, and several other pictures ? He squeezed my arm with some pathos on communicating his purpose, and added that he should part with neither of mine. Full well he knows that the time to sell them is not come yet. The Brown he sold privately to White of Madox Street. The rest he put into a sale at Christie’s, after taking my advice as to the reserve he ought to put on the Hunt, which I fixed at 500 guineas. It reached 300 in real biddings, after which Mac’s touters ran it up to 430, trying to revive it, but of course it remains with him. The Millais did not reach his reserve, either, but he afterwards exchanged it with White for a small Turner. The Hughes sold for 67 guineas, which really, though by no means a large price for it, surprised me, considering that the people in the sale-room must have heard of Hughes for the first time, though the auctioneer unblushingly described him as “ a great artist, though a young one.” I have no doubt, if Mac had put his pictures into the sale in good time, instead of adding them on at the last moment, they would all have gone at excellent prices.

Some of the pictures in the body of the sale went tremendously. Goodall’s daub of Raising the May-Pole fetched (at least ostensibly) 850. I like MacCrac pretty well enough, but he is quite different in appearance, of course, from my idea of him. My stern treatment of him was untempered by even a moment’s weakness. I told him I had nothing whatever to show him, and that his picture was not begun, which placed us at once on a perfect understanding. He seems hard up. . . .

There are dense fogs of heat here now, through which sea and sky loom as one wall, with the webbed craft creeping on it like flies, or standing there as if they would drop off dead. I wander over the baked cliffs, seeking rest and finding none. And it will be even worse in London. I shall become like the Messer Brunetto of the “ cotto aspetto,” which, by the bye, Carlyle bestows upon Sordello instead ! It is doing him almost as shabby a turn as Browning’s.

The crier is just going up this street and moaning out notices of sale. Why cannot one put all one’s plagues and the skeletons of one’s house into his hands, and tell them and sell them without reserve ? Perhaps they would suit somebody. . . .

Rossetti’s humorous sallies against Francis MacCracken must not be taken too seriously. “ He really liked him, and had reason for doing so.” (W. M. R.) This Belfast shipping-agent “ was a profound believer in the ‘ graduate,’ as he termed Ruskin.” From Rossetti he bought in 1853 the Ecce Ancilla Domini, which had been exhibited three years earlier, and had been returned unsold. Its price was only £50. In 1886 it was added to the London National Gallery at the cost of £840. “ MacCracken was always hard up for money, but he was devoted to Preraphaelitism.” For Arthur Hughes’s Ophelia he had undertaken to give 60 guineas. He gave in reality 30 guineas and two small pictures by Wilson, a painter at that time of no account, though highly esteemed now. Unfortunately, the young Preraphaelite could not bide his time, and had to turn his pictures into cash. Being sent to the leading art auctioneers, they were sold for £5. At Ophelia Mr. Hughes had been long working, when one day Alexander Munro, a young sculptor, burst into his studio, with most of the Preraphaelites at his back. Deverell found fault with a bat flying across the stream, but Rossetti warmly defended it, as “ one of the finest things in the picture.” “ He always was,” Mr. Hughes tells me, “ most generous in his admiration ; anything that he did not like he hated as heartily. His manners were fascinating, enthusiastic, and generous.”

Coventry Patmore, speaking of Rossetti’s “ extraordinary faculty for seeing objects in such a fierce light of imagination as very few poets have been able to throw upon external things,” continues : “ He can he forgiven for spoiling a tender lyric by a stanza such as this, which seems scratched with an adamantine pen upon a slab of agate: —

This stanza of Even So finds its first sketch —by no means a rough one — in Rossetti’s description of the “ dense fogs of heat ” at Hastings.

Carlyle, in his third lecture on Heroes and Hero-Worship, spoke of 44 that poor Sordello with the cotto aspetto, 4 face baked,’ ” referring to a celebrated passage in Dante’s Inferno. It was not Sordello, but Brunetti Latini whom the poet described. This error ran through the early editions of the Lectures, but was corrected in the later. 44 The suggestion that Browning did a shabby turn to Sordello by writing the poem is of course mere chaff; for Rossetti, in all those years, half worshiped the poem, and thrust it down everybody’s throat.” (W. M. R.)

III.

[Indorsed July 24, 1854.]

Sunday.

. . . Maclennan (whom you once met at my rooms) visited Cambridge with my brother the other day, and at some gathering there they met Macmillan, the publisher, to whom Maclennan spoke of my translations, which he expressed every good disposition to publish. He also said he had some time been wishing to propose to Millais, Hunt, and me to illustrate a Life of Christ.

My original poems are all (or all the best) in an aboriginal state, being beginnings, though some of them very long beginnings, and not one, I think, fairly copied. Moreover, I am always hoping to finish those I like ; I know they would have no chance if shown to you unfinished, as I am sure they would not please you in that state, and then I should feel disgusted with them. This is the sheer truth. Of short pieces I have seldom or never done anything tolerable, except perhaps sonnets; but if I can find any which I think in any sense legible, I will send them with the translations. I wish, if you write anything you care to show, you would reciprocate, as you may be sure I care to see. As a grand installment I send you the MacCrac sonnet: it hangs over him as yet like the sword of Damocles. I dare say you remember Tennyson’s sonnet, The Kraken : it is in the MS. book of mine yon have by you, so compare.

MACCRACKEN.

You ’ll find it very close to the original as well as to fact.

I ’ll add my last sonnet, made two days ago, though at the risk of seeming trivial after the stern reality of the above:—

But my sonnets are not generally finished till I see them again after forgetting them, and this is only two days old.

. . . Hunt has written Millais another letter at last; the first since his second to me, months ago. It was sent to me by M., but I had to send it on to Lear, or would have let you have it, as it is full of curious depths and difficulties in style and matter, and contains an account of his penetrating to the central chamber of the Pyramids. He is at Jerusalem now, where he has taken a house, and seems in great ravishment, so I suppose he is not likely to be back yet. Have you seen the lying dullness of that ass Waagen, anent the Light of the World, in Times last week ? There is a still more incredible paragraph, amounting to blasphemy, in yesterday’s Athenæum, which you will see soon. I hope you got the last one. . . .

Hughes, I think, is in the country again, at Burnham. What a capital sketch of one, though not the best of your face’s phases, Hughes did before you left ! I suppose it must supersede, for posterity, that railway portrait, which was so decidedly en train. I trust certainly to join Hughes in at any rate one of the illustrations of Day and Night Songs, of which I hope both his and mine will be worthy ; else there is nothing so much spoils a good hook as an attempt to embody its ideas, only going halfway. Is St. Margaret’s Eve to be in ? That would be illustratable. By the bye, Miss S. has made a splendid design from that Sister Helen of mine. Those she did at Hastings for the old ballads illustrate The Lass of Lochryan and The Gay Goss Hawk, but they are only first sketches. As to all you say about her and the hospital, etc., I think just at present, at any rate, she had better keep out, as she has made a design which is practicable for her to paint quietly at my rooms, having convinced herself that nothing which involved her moving constantly from place to place is possible at present. She will begin it now at once, and try at least whether it is possible to carry it on without increased danger to her health. The subject is the Nativity, designed in a most lovely and original way. For my own part, the more I think of the Brighton Hospital for her, the more I become convinced that when left there to brood over her inactivity, with images of disease and perhaps death on every side, she could not but feel very desolate and miserable. If it seemed at this moment urgently necessary that she should go there, the matter would be different; but Wilkinson says that he considers her better. I wish, and she wishes, that something should be done by her to make a beginning, and set her mind a little at ease about her pursuit of art, and we both think that this more than anything would be likely to have a good effect on her health. It seems hard to me, when I look at her sometimes, working or too ill to work, and think how many without one tithe of her genius or greatness of spirit have granted them abundant health and opportunity to labor through the little they can do or will do, while perhaps her soul is never to bloom nor her bright hair to fade, but after hardly escaping from degradation and corruption, all she might have been must sink out again unprofitably in that dark house where she was born. How truly she may say, “ No man cared for my soul ” ! I do not mean to make myself an exception, for how long I have known her, and not thought of this till so late, perhaps too late ! But it is no use writing more about this subject; and I fear, too, my writing at all about it must prevent your easily believing it to be, as it is, by far the nearest thing to my heart.

I will write you something of my own doings soon, I hope ; at present I could only speak of discomfitures. About the publication of the ballads, or indeed of your songs either, it has occurred to me we might reckon Macmillan as one possible string to the bow. Smith ought to be bowstrung himself, or hamstrung, or something, for fighting shy of so much honor. By the bye, I turned up the other day, at my rooms, that copy of Routledge’s poets which you brought as a specimen. Ought I to send it back ? Goodmorning.

Your

D. G. ROSSETTI.

John Ferguson Maclennan is known by his work on Primitive Marriage. Rossetti was obliged to wait seven years longer before he could find a publisher for his poems.

The following is Tennyson’s sonnet so humorously parodied by Rossetti.

THE KRAKEN.

The sonnet which Rossetti “ made two days ago ” he gave himself time to forget again and again, for it was not published till 1881. Under the title of Lost on Both Sides it forms Sonnet XCI. of Ballads and Sonnets, in the following version : —

Lear is C. H. Lear, whose paintings Rossetti at one time admired, — not Edmund Lear, the author of The Book of Nonsense.

For Allingham’s Day and Night Songs Rossetti and Millais each did a single illustration, Arthur Hughes doing eight.

Miss S. is Miss Siddal, with whom Rossetti had fallen in love so early as 1850, though it was not till 1860 that he married her. His brother has told us how her striking face and “ copperygolden hair ” were discovered, as it were, by Deverell in a bonnet-shop. She sat to him, to Holman Hunt, and to Millais, but most of all to Rossetti. The following account was given me one day as I sat in the studio of Arthur Hughes, surrounded by some beautiful sketches he had lately taken on the coast, of Cornwall:

“ Deverell accompanied his mother one day to a milliner’s. Through an open door he saw a girl working with her needle ; he got his mother to ask her to sit to him. She was the future Mrs. Rossetti. Millais painted her for his Ophelia, — wonderfully like her. She was tall and slender, with red coppery hair and bright consumptive complexion; though in these early years she had no striking signs of ill health. She was exceedingly quiet, speaking very little. She had read Tennyson, having first come to know something about him by finding one or two of his poems on a piece of paper which she brought home to her mother wrapped round a pat of butter. Rossetti taught her to draw. She used to be drawing while sitting to him. Her drawings were beautiful, but without force. They were feminine likenesses of his own.”

Rossetti’s pet names for her were Guggum, Guggums, or Gug. “ All the Ruskins were most delighted with Guggum,” he wrote. “ John Ruskin said she was a noble, glorious creature, and his father said, by her look and manner she might have been a countess.” Ruskin used to call her Ida.

IV.

Tuesday, August [1854], BLACKFRIARS.

... Of the two ballads you sent me, I prefer the one I knew already, and which is one of the very few really fine things of the kind written in our day. The other has many beauties, though; indeed, is all beautiful, except, I think, the last couplet, which seems a trifle too homely, a little in the broad-sheet song style. The subject you propose for my woodcut from it is a first-rate one, and I have already made some scratches for its arrangement. I have got one of the blocks from Hughes, and hope soon to tell you it is done. What a pity they will not let the blocks be a little larger ! Is not The Maids of Elfen-Mere founded on some northern legend or other ? I seem to have read something about it in Keightley or somewhere.

Tell me if I shall send you back the copy of it you sent, and the one of St. Margaret’s Eve. I don’t bully the last lines of your ballad, by the bye, because you did n’t like the last lines of my sonnet, which are certainly foggy. Would they be better thus ? —

Or I should like better, —

but fear the rhyme “ long ” and “ along ” is hardly admissible. What say you ? Or can you propose any other improvement ?

I ’ve referred to my notebook for the above alteration, and therein are various sonnets and beginnings of sonnets written at crisises (? !) of happy inspiration. Here’s one which I remember writing in great, glory on the top of a hill which I reached one after-sunset in Warwickshire, last year. I’m afraid, though, it is n’t much good.

It strikes me, in copying, what a good thing I did not adopt the first alternative, or I might not be here to copy. Here ’s a rather better sonnet, I hope, written only two or three days ago. I believe the affection in the last half was rather “ looked up,” at the time of writing, to suit the parallel in the first. Do you not always like your last thing the best for a little while ?

. . . The fact is, I think well of very little I have written, and am afraid of people agreeing with me, which I should find a bore. I believe my poetry and painting prevented each other from doing much good for a long while, and now I think I could do better in either, but can’t write, for then I shan’t paint. However, one day I hope at least to finish the few rhymes I have by me that I care for at all, and then there they ’ll be, at any rate. Your plan of a joint volume among us of poems and pictures is a capital one — and how many capital plans we have!

I’ve got the Folio here. It contains a design by Millais, of the Recall of the Romans from Britain ; one by Stephens, of Death and the Rioters; one by Barbara S., — a glen scene; and one by A. M. H., called the Castaways, which is rather a strong-minded subject, involving a dejected female, mud with lilies lying in it, a dust-heap, and other details, and symbolical of something improper. Of course, seriously, Miss H. is quite right in painting it, if she chooses, and she is doing so. I dare say it will be a good picture. William, Christina, and I were there lately. The Howitts asked me for your address, as they wanted to write to you. I don’t know what design I shall put into the Folio. I’m doing one of Hamlet and Ophelia, which I meant for it, — deeply symbolical and far-sighted, of course,—but I fear I shall not get it done in time to start the Folio again soon, so may put in a design I have made of Found.

The other day, looking over papers, I turned up those sheets of Sutton’s poetry, about which I remember a slight shrug of shoulders and contraction of eyebrows on your part, under the idea that the Fleet Ditch had engulfed them. I ’ll inclose them too.

What do you think of MacCrac having been again in town ? I fear he is taking to wild habits. The epithet oneeyed, in his sonnet, had better stand downy, as the other is certainly ambiguous. By the bye, that is a kind accompaniment to his visit and my most cordial reception, is n’t it ?

I ’ll keep an eye on all whom I know who have contracted the bad habit of picture-buying, with a view to their ultimately finding themselves possessed of a Millais or a Boyce, as per instructions.

Write soon, and believe me,

Yours affectionately,

D. G. ROSSETTI.

The “ too homely ” couplet in Allingham’s Maids of Elfen-Mere is as follows:

Of the first of the two new sonnets (The Hill Summit, Sonnet LXX. of Ballads and Sonnets), the first six lines were not changed. The last eight were modified as follows: —

In the second sonnet there are some slight changes.

The belief that Rossetti’s poetry hindered his progress in painting led his father, writes W. M. Rossetti, “to reprehend him sharply, and even severely; and to reprehension he was at all times more than sufficiently stubborn. He grieved over the matter of our father’s displeasure to his dying day.”

The Folio was to contain the drawings of a newly formed sketching-club, of which Mr. Hughes gives me the following account: “ Millais, who was the only man among us who had any money, provided a nice green portfolio with a lock, in which to keep the drawings. Each member of the club was to put into it every month one drawing in black and white, the case going the round. Millais did his, and one or two others did theirs. Then the Folio came to Rossetti, where it stuck forever. It never reached me. According to his wont, he had at first been most enthusiastic over the scheme, and had so infected Millais with his enthusiasm that he at once ordered the case.”

Frederick G. Stephens was one of the seven Preraphaelite Brothers. Barbara S. was Barbara Leigh Smith (afterwards Madame Bodichon), by whose munificence was laid the foundation of Girton College, Cambridge, England, the first institution in which a university education was given to women. A. M. H. was Anna Mary Howitt (afterwards Mrs. Howitt-Watts). Of her Rossetti wrote to his sister a few months earlier : “ Anna Mary has painted a sunlight picture of Margaret (Faust) in a congenial wailing state.”

“ Sutton was (if I remember right) a man in a humble position of life, who professed to be descended from George Herbert. The Fleet Ditch ran under my brother’s windows overlooking Blackfriars Bridge. There was a funny anecdote (true) about his throwing away into the ditch some book he scorned ; he did this two or three times over, and each time it was brought back by a ‘ mud-lark.’ Perhaps the book was this of Sutton’s.” (W. M. R.)

In the last paragraph of this letter is seen an instance of that zeal of Rossetti’s which never failed when there was a chance of helping a friend. The following record by my wife of a talk she had with an old friend of ours and his illustrates this, and explains, though it does not justify, one side of the great painter’s character: —

“ I said that these Rossetti letters had given us so much higher an opinion of the man than we had ever had before that we all the more regretted the want of honesty he had about the execution of commissions. He looked very sad, and, I could see, felt the subject painfully. ‘ Yes,’ he said, ‘ it was much to be regretted ; but, after all, I don’t think W. B. Scott need have said what he did. He was not the man to judge fairly. Here was Scott, a typical Scotchman, caring for money and knowing its worth, and at the same time possessed of all a Scotchman’s integrity as regards money matters; and here was Rossetti, an Italian all over, caring for money, too, but lavish and generous, wanting it to give away as much as for himself. He was awfully generous, and he was a sort of Robin Hood in art; he thought the rich ought to be made to pay for the good of the poor artists, and he would get all the money he could out of them ; but he would do this as much for others as for himself. Oh, he would work night and day to help a poor friend ; he would give a rich man, who he thought ought to buy a friend’s picture, no peace, till the rich man bought it only to get rid of his importunity. And then how generous he was in his judgment of a friend’s work ! ’ Here he paused, and I could see his mind wandering back to the old days, fondly dwelling on the various acts of kindness he had himself received from Rossetti. I could say no more of shortcomings.”

V.

September 19, 1854.

. . . Hughes was here the other evening, and showed me several sketches and wood-blocks he has drawn, — all of them excellent in many ways ; but the blocks I think, especially the one of the man and girl at a stile, rather wanting in force for the engraver. He agreed with me, and I believe will do something to amend this. He has made a few very nice little sketches for cuts in the text, if such should prove admissible. One or two for the Fairies are remarkably original. I should really, I believe, have got mine in hand before this, but various troublesome anxieties have interfered with that and other work, among the rest with my duty to the Folio, which is still by me. I shan’t put in my modern design, and must finish one of two or three I have going on, instead. I am doing one, which I think will be the one, of Hamlet and Ophelia, so treated as I think to embody and symbolize the play without obtrusiveness or interference with the subject as a subject. . . . I’ve also read some of the Stones of Venice, having received all Raskin’s books from him, really a splendid present, including even the huge plates of Venetian architecture. I ’ve heard again from him at Chamounix. I ’ve been greatly interested in Wuthering Heights, the first novel I’ve read for an age, and the best (as regards power and sound style) for two ages, except Sidonia. But it is a fiend of a book, an incredible monster, combining all the stronger female tendencies from Mrs. Browning to Mrs. Brownrigg. The action is laid in hell, — only it seems places and people have English names there. Did you ever read it ?

I think you are quite right about leaving out a few of my translations from the volume, and should like to know which you think. I had thought so myself, but shall copy out all I have done before determining. I am very glad you like them so much, and will send more when copied.

My plan as to their form is, I think, a preface for the first part, containing those previous to Dante, and a connecting essay (but not bulky) for the second part, containing Dante and his contemporaries, as many of them are in the form of correspondence, etc., very interesting, and require some annotation. I think you have few or none of this class. I shall include the Vita Nuova, I am almost sure, and then the volume will be a thick one. I think, if it were possible to bring some or all out first, as you say, in a good magazine, the plan might be a very good one. Indeed, anything that paid would be very useful just now, as I do not forget my debts. I’ve a longish story more than half done, which might likely be even more marketable in this way. It is not so intensely metaphysical as that in The Germ. If I possibly can manage to copy what I ’ve done of it, I ’d like to send it you. By the bye, in my last long letter (a Long letter, Allingham) I put two sonnets which I ’m afraid you did n’t like. Pray tell me, too, about the alteration I there proposed in the last lines of one, which you objected to.

I fear this letter has as many I’s as Argus : argal it is snobbish. . . .

The sketches were for Allingham’s Day and Night Songs. The Fairies is the charming nursery song, “ Up the airy mountain,” known to thousands and thousands of children. Hughes’s woodcut is the frontispiece of the volume. Rossetti’s woodcut for this work was, his brother believes, “ the first he actually produced.”

In August of this year Rossetti wrote to his aunt: —

“ I have received from Mr. Ruskin the very valuable present of all his works, — including eight volumes, three pamphlets, and some large folio plates of Venetian architecture. He wished me to accept these as a gift, but it is such a costly one that I have told him I shall make him a small water-color in exchange.”

Sidonia the Sorceress is by William Meinhold. For this work “ Rossetti had a positive passion ; he much preferred it to The Amber Witch of the same author.” (W. M. R.)

Writing to his sister Christina, on December 3, 1875, about her new volume of poems, he says : “ The first of the two poems [on the Franco-Prussian war] seems to me just a little echoish of the Barrett-Browning style.... A real taint, to some extent, of modern vicious style, derived from the same source, — what might be called a falsetto muscularity, — always seemed to me much too prominent in the long piece called The Lowest Room.”

Mrs. Brownrigg is best illustrated by the following parody, in The Anti-Jacobin, of Southey’s Inscription for the Apartment in Chepstow Castle where Henry Marten, the Regicide, was imprisoned Thirty Years.

INSCRIPTION

FOR THE DOOR OF THE CELL IN NEWGATE, WHERE MRS. BROWNRIGG, THE ’PRENTI-CIDE, WAS CONFINED PREVIOUS TO HER EXECUTION.

Rossetti’s translation of the Vita Nuova was included in his Early Italian Poets, now named Dante and his Circle.

His debts, which he says he does not forget, troubled him through life. Of his old father, the poor exile, even when his sight was failing and a real tussle for the means of subsistence arose,” his son William could say : “ No butcher, nor baker, nor candlestick-maker ever had a claim upon us for a sixpence unpaid.” On April 24, 1876, Rossetti told his mother that in the last year he had made £3725. He added: “ I believe this is somewhere about my average income, yet I am always hard up for £50.”

“ 1 A longish story ’ must be the one which was first called An Autopsychology, and afterwards St. Agnes of Intercession, written towards 1850. It is published (uncompleted) in his Collected Works.” (W. M. R.) It was to have been published in The Germ. “ Millais did an etching for it.”

Of the “ metaphysical ” story, Hand and Soul, in the first number of The Germ, Rossetti writes : “ I wrote it (with the exception of an opening page or two) all in one night, in December, 1849 ; beginning, I suppose, about two A. M., and ending about seven.”

The Germ was the magazine of the P. R. B. Its sale was very small, and it soon came to an end. Among the contributors to the first number were Dante, William, and Christina Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, Coventry Patmore, and Thomas Woolner. “ After balancing receipts and expenditure,” writes William Rossetti, “ we had to meet a printer’s bill of £33 odd. This seems now a very moderate burden ; but it was none the less a troublesome one to all or most of us at that period. For many years past it has been a literary curiosity, fetching high fancy prices.” For the four numbers so much as £9 has been given. Mr. Hughes tells me that one day when he was working among the students at the Royal Academy Munro brought in the first number. It was handed round, and on all sides jeered at. When it came to him, he was greatly struck with it, above all with W. M. Rossetti’s sonnet on the title-page, which had a real influence on his life. His admiration of it made him known to Munro, and through him to Rossetti and the other Preraphaelites.

VI.

Sunday, 15 October [1854].

. . . My time has lately been engrossed by the background of my modern subject, which I have been painting out of doors at Chiswick, — cold work these last days, but much finer weather hitherto than I dare to hope for again in all probability. It will be a disappointment to me if I am balked, after all, and cannot get done before the unmanageable weather. I paint daily within earshot almost of Hogarth’s grave, — a good omen for one’s modern picture ! This work has left me no time at all for anything else lately. Ruskin is back again, and wrote to me, naming a day when he meant to call, but I was obliged to write I could not be at my rooms. He has written again since, saying he wants to consult with me about plans for “ teaching the masons; ” so you may soon expect to find every man shoulder his hod, “ with upturned fervid face and hair put back.” I am painting near the house of some old friends of ours at Chiswick, the family of Mr. Keightley, whom you have heard me name. They are Irish people, and of course I introduced the Songs. Old K. was taken with the Fairies, and there is a very nice girl who especially delights in Æolian Harp No. 1, and dreamt your Dream right through the night after reading it. . . .

Thanks for your kind suggestions and offers of mediation as to printing some of my Italian poems in a magazine. Fraser’s, if attainable, would be the one I should prefer to any other. But I have had no time to think about this yet since reading your letter, and must answer it more at length next time. When you send me back the MS. you have, I think there will be another batch ready copied for you. I am very anxious indeed to see your annotations, and doubt not to profit by them. Thanks also for your criticisms on the sonnet. The construction of those four lines is thus : —

Only the metre forced me to transpose. It is meant to refer to the effect one is nearly sure to see in passing along a road at sunset, when the sun glares in a radiating focus behind some low bush or some hedge on the horizon of the meadows. But it is obscure, I believe, though if I were disposed to be stiff-necked, I might lug up William, to whom I have just showed the sonnet, and who understood the line in question at once. But I ’ll try to alter it, if worth working at. In the hateful mechanical brick-painting I have been at I have had time to make verses, and have finished a ballad, professedly modern-antique, of which I remember once telling you the story as we were walking about Mrs. Arme’s garden. I ’ll copy it for you and inclose it with this, asking your severest criticism. I doubt myself whether it at all succeeds in its attempt. However, I don’t think it is finished yet, and if any feature should suggest itself to you as [word illegible] to the story or preferable, pray mention it. I have purposely taken an unimportant phrase here and there from the old things. I was doubting whether it would not be better to make the improper lord and lady slip into a newmade grave, while wading through the churchyard, and be drowned. This might make a good description and conclusion, and I fear the thing is at present almost too unpoetical in style. Tell me what you think, or whether the present ending seems the more or less hackneyed of the two.

I send you the last bit of Hunt received last night. Let me have it again, please, at once, as I must answer it soon for conscience’ sake, as that projected letter he writes that he was expecting from me was never written, after all.

I think I remember your once speaking to me of Wuthering Heights, long ago. I never read any of Currer Bell. Is she half as good? I see by the advertisements of Smith & Elder that W. B. Scott’s Poems are out, and hope soon to get one from him. . . .

Rossetti’s “modern subject” is the picture called. Found. “ It was,” writes W. M. Rossetti, “ a source of lifelong vexation to my brother and to the gentlemen — some three or four in succession — who commissioned him to finish it. It was nearly completed, but not quite, towards the close of his life. It represents a rustic lover, a drover [a farmer?], who finds his old sweetheart at a low depth of degradation, both from vice and penury, in the streets of London. He endeavors to lift her as she crouches on the pavement.” In 1859 a commission was given Rossetti for the picture at 320 guineas. On February 4,1881, he wrote, “ The Found progresses rapidly.”

Ruskin’s “ plans for ‘ teaching the masons ’ ” is explained in letter VIII.

That “ upturned fervid face and hair put back ” is from Sordello, London edition, 1885, page 214.

Mr. Keightley was “ the historian and author of The Fairy Mythology, a book,” writes W. M. Rossetti, “which formed one of the leading delights of our childhood.”

Into Fraser’s Magazine Rossetti was not likely to find admittance. The Table-Talk of Shirley shows how hostile John Parker, the editor, was to the new School of poetry. Some six years later, Rossetti tried, through Ruskin, to get some of his poems published in The Cornhill Magazine, but nothing came of it.

The ballad which Rossetti had finished was Stratton Water. Fifteen years later he added some stanzas.

VII.

Monday, half past six o’clock. [About November, 1854.]

DEAR ALLINGHAM, — I suppose you are gone to bask in the southern ray. I should follow, but feel very sick, and, moreover, have lunched late to-day with Ruskin. We read half through Day and Night Songs together, and I gave him the book. He was most delighted, and said some of it was heavenly. . . .

About this time Ruskin wrote to Rossetti : “ I forgot to say also that I really do covet your drawings as much as I covet Turner’s; only it is useless self-indulgence to buy Turner’s, and useful selfindulgence to buy yours. Only I won’t have them after they have been more than nine times rubbed entirely out, — remember that.”

VIII.

FINCHLEY, November, 1854.

... I have had a hasty look (such as my leisure lately has left possible) through your MS., much of which is as exquisite as can be or ever has been, — pure beauty and delight. The Queen of the Forest, Hughes tells me, is to be withdrawn, as capable of fuller treatment. I am quite of your mind about it, and chiefly because it is already so peculiarly lovely as to be worthy of any elaboration. The Æolian Harp in long lines is equal to any of that series, and I should have many things to say of many others, if the MS. were only by me. I must write of them when they are printed, and I hope talk of them too with you by that time. You mention having sent a copy of Day and Night Songs to Ruskin: did you remember that I had already given him one ? I trust he and you will meet when next in London. He has been back about a month or so, looking very well and in excellent spirits. Perhaps you know that he has joined Maurice’s scheme for a Working Men’s College, which has now begun to be put in operation at 31 Red Lion Square ? Ruskin has most liberally undertaken a drawing-class, which he attends every Thursday evening, and he and I had a long confab about plans for teaching. He is most enthusiastic about it, and has so infected me that I think of offering an evening weekly for the same purpose, when I am settled in town again. At present I am hard at work out here on my picture, painting the calf and cart. It has been fine clear weather, though cold, till now, but these two days the rain has set in (for good, I fear), and driven me to my wits’ end, as even were I inclined to paint notwithstanding, the calf would be like a hearth - rug after half an hour’s rain ; but I suppose I must turn out to-morrow and try. A very disagreeable part of the business is that I am being obliged to a farmer whom I cannot pay for his trouble in providing calf and all, as he insists on being good natured. As for the calf, he kicks and fights all the time he remains tied up, which is five or six hours daily, and the view of life induced at his early age by experience in art appears to be so melancholy that he punctually attempts suicide by hanging himself at half past three daily P. M. At these times I have to cut him down, and then shake him up and lick him like blazes. There is a pleasure in it, my dear fellow: the Smithfield drovers are a kind of opiumeaters at it, but a moderate practitioner might perhaps sustain an argument. I hope soon to be back at my rooms, as I have been quite long enough at my rhumes. (The above joke did service for MacCrac’s benefit last night.)

Before I came here I had been painting ever so long at a brick wall at Chiswick which is in my foreground. By the bye, that boating sketch of yours is really good in its way, and would bear showing to Ruskin as an original Turner, and perhaps selling to Windus afterwards.

Many thanks for your minute criticism on my ballad, which was just of the kind I wanted. Not, of course, that a British poet is going to knock under on all points ; accordingly, I take care to disagree from you in various respects, as regards abruptnesses, improbabilities, prosaicisms, coarsenesses, and other esses and isms, not more prominent, I think, in my production than in its models. As to dialect there is much to be said, but I doubt much whether, as you say, mine is more Scotticised than many or even the majority of genuine old ballads. If the letter and poem were here, I might perhaps bore you with counter-analysis. But in very many respects I shall benefit greatly by your criticisms, if ever I think the ballad worth working on again, without which it would certainly not be worth printing.

I have read Patmore’s poem which he sent me, and about which I might say a good deal of all kinds, if I felt up to it to-night; but I don’t. He was going to publish (and had actually printed the title) with the pseudonym of C. K. Dighton; but was induced at the last moment to cancel the title, as well as a marvelous note at the end, accounting for some part of the poem being taken out of his former book by some story of a butterman and a piece of waste paper, or something of that sort! (I see my description is as lucid as the note.)

Did you see a paragraph in the Illustrated London News headed Americans at Florence, and giving a longish account of a backwoods poem called The New Pastoral, to be immediately published by Read ? Have you seen anything of W. B. Scott’s volume ? I may be able to send it you sooner or later, if you like. The title-page has a vignette with the words “Poems by a Painter” printed very gothically indeed. A copy being sent to old Carlyle, he did not read any of the poems, but read the title “ Poems by a Printer.” He wrote off at once to the imaginary printer to tell him to stick to his types and give up his metaphors. Woolner saw the book lying at Carlyle’s, heard the story, and told him of his mistake, at which he had the decency to seem a little annoyed, as he knows Scott, and esteems him and his family. Now that we are allied with Turkey, we might think seriously of the bastinado for the old man, on such occasions as the above.

This is the last of Brown’s note-paper (I am staying with him here), so I must leave some other things till next time, especially as it is fearfully late. Miss Siddal is moderately well and making designs, etc.

Yours affectionately,

D. G. ROSSETTI.

The manuscript poems through which Rossetti had a hasty look form the second series of Day and Night Songs. The Queen of the Forest was published in Flower Pieces, a volume which bears the following inscription: “To Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose early friendship brightened many days of my life, and whom I never can forget. W. A.”

The foundation of the Working Men’s College has been described by Mr. J. M. Ludlow in The Atlantic Monthly for January, 1896. Of Rossetti’s method of teaching I have received the following account from a drawing-master who was one of the students of the college : —

“ I was not exactly a pupil of Rossetti’s, although I was of Ruskin’s. The classes were on the same floor, and there was constant communication between them. We saw the work done, and discussed the methods and incidents. Rossetti began at once with color, not with light and shade. At a time when this was heresy, when even Mr. Ruskin objected, Rossetti gave his students color, and full color, to begin with. Most of them could draw a little ; but even that would not have stopped him. Draw or not, he gave them color. A teacher is supposed to analyze his subject, and prepare for its difficulties by giving beforehand its elements in a simple form, one at a time. Rossetti put a bird or a boy before his class, and said, ‘ Do it;’ and the spirit of the teacher was of more value than any system. I look back to those times with great pleasure; they have helped me much. Only about a month since a new syllabus for drawing for elementary schools was issued by the government, in which children are allowed to use color as soon as they begin. Here to-day we have, forty years afterwards, Rossetti’s principle acknowledged by the government. That it did not come direct from Rossetti, but by another and independent course, is some evidence in its favor.

“ Again, Rossetti often brought the works he was engaged on, in their incomplete state, for us to see. I remember some of them, and here again he helped me years afterwards ; but he did not generally get the class to do what he was doing himself. I think he should have required imaginative work from all the class,—pictures from their own imagination of scenes from poetry, story, and myths.”

The following account has been given me of Rossetti’s residence at Finchley while he was working at Found. He had for some time been painting in Madox Brown’s studio in town, when his friend took a small cottage at Finchley for himself, wife, and baby. Besides the kitchen it had but two rooms, a parlor and a bedroom. Rossetti wanted to paint a white calf. Brown, thinking that he would take only a day or two over such a piece of work, asked him to visit him. There was, he said, a farmyard on the other side of the road, where there were several calves ; as for a bed, he could have a mattress on the floor of the parlor. Rossetti, who had never painted a calf before, found greater difficulties in the subject than either he or his friend expected. Moreover, his ideas of the picture grew. Long before the sketch was finished the calf had grown too big, and another had to be provided. The visit was prolonged, to the great discomfort of the little family. Brown, who was most good natured, took it all good humoredly, though he would now and then complain to a friend that Gabriel would sit up half the night talking poetry, and lie half the day in bed in their one sitting-room, excluding Mrs. Brown and the baby.

Before Rossetti went to Chiswick to paint the brick wall he wrote to his mother : Have you or Christina any recollection of an eligible and accessible brick wall ? I should want to get up and paint it early in the mornings, as the light ought to be that of dawn. It should be not too countrified (yet beautiful in color), as it is to represent a city wall. A certain modicum of moss would therefore be admissible, but no prodigality of grass, weeds, ivy. etc.”

Allingham’s drawings were sometimes reproduced, in illustrating articles of his in magazines. Windus, who was to buy his sketch, was a retired man of business, who lived in the village in which I spent my early days. He had inherited a fortune, it was said, from an uncle after whom he was named, the proprietor of a cordial by which many fretful infants have been soothed into the next world. He had a fine collection of the early Preraphaelite pictures. Whether he had any real knowledge of painting I do not know. I have rarely seen any one who, to judge by external appearances, was farther removed from poetry or art. The following anecdote I have from my wife : “ I one day took some friends from the country to see Mr. Windus’s collection of paintings in his very pretty old-fashioned house on Tottenham Green. He was one of the earliest buyers of the P. R. B. work, and in one of the quaint paneled drawing-rooms Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat hung over the fireplace, with one of Turner’s drawings in his latest style on each side of it, and Millais’s Vale of Rest on the opposite wall. Four rooms were thickly hung with pictures, and we found enough to keep us interested for some time. Before leaving, ‘ Let us go back into the first room,’ I said, ‘ and have one more look at the Scapegoat.’ We did so, and then I gazed for some time at the Turner drawings, trying very hard to make out what they were about, and feeling that I was very dull of comprehension. ‘It’s of no use!’ I exclaimed at last: 1 I cannot see what it means ! Those lovely shades of orange and blue and gray are beautiful, but I cannot for the life of me tell what they are meant to represent.’ ‘ That only shows that you know nothing at all about it! ’ said a squeaky little voice over my shoulder; and looking round, I saw that the owner of the pictures had come in, unperceived, and had overheard my remark.”

Rossetti, in spite of his parentage (of his grandparents, three were Italian, and only one was English), speaks of himself in this letter as “ a British poet.” “ He liked England and the English,” writes his brother, “ better than any other country and nation. He was in many respects an Englishman in grain, and even a prejudiced Englishman. He was quite as ready as other Britons to reckon to the discredit of Frenchmen, and generally of foreigners, a certain shallow and frothy demonstrativeness; too ready, I always thought.”

Patmore’s poem was The Angel in the House.

Thomas Buchanan Read was an American poet, and a painter by profession as well, author of Rural Poems, Lays, and Ballads. He died several years ago. He was a curiously small man in stature, and had a pleasant little wife on exactly a corresponding scale. He had suffered with Rossetti under the unjust law of distraint. W. M. Rossetti wrote to Ailingham on August 10, 1850 : “ As for Read, he left on Friday week in something of a hurry and confusion, owing to an execution for rent put into Gabriel’s lodgings on the fugitive landlord’s account; whereby Read’s trunk, etc., were, inter alia, laid under embargo ; indeed, he has been compelled to leave them behind.” Rossetti’s landlord was a dancing-master, “ who failed to pay his rent. According to the oppressive system of those days, the goods of his sub-tenant were seized to make good the default. Dante and I,” continues his brother, “carried away a considerable number of books. The bulk of his small belongings was confiscated, and appeared to his eyes no more.”

In W. B. Scott’s Life (vol. ii. pp. 2124) are given two of Carlyle’s letters about Poems by a Painter. Rossetti would have spared the old man the bastinado had he read his apology for his blunder. It begins : “ It is too certain I have committed an absurd mistake, which indeed I discerned two weeks ago with an emotion compounded of astonishment, remorse, and the tendency to laugh and cry both at once.”

George Birkbeck Hill.