Chapter XI. Three Households

Apr 1860. Mrs Madox Brown did not fail in due time to send the invitation, which it will be believed was eagerly "grabbed at," and in April, 1860, I went up to London for a happy month in Fortess Terrace, seeing Edward constantly and making and renewing pleasant acquaintances. The unselfishness of Mr. and Mrs. Madox Brown in this matter is clearer to me now than it was at the time, for I realize on reflection that, besides their risking the proverbial irksomeness of the society of betrothed people, it must have needed the best will in the world to accommodate in their house even one person beyond their own family; but a small house and slender means were made spacious and sufficient by their generous hearts, and my recollection is of one continuous stream of hospitality. Who that was present at it could ever forget one of their dinners, with Madox Brown and his wife seated at either end of a long table, and every guest a welcome friend who had come to talk and to laugh and to listen? for listening was the attitude into which people naturally fell when in his company. He had so much to say and was so happy in saying it that sometimes he would pause, carving-knife in hand, to go on with his story, until Mrs. Brown's soft voice could be heard breathing his name from her distant place and reminding him of his duties. At their table the standard of the common English willowrpattern plate was boldly raised, in spite of Gabriers enquiries for it at a china shop having been met with insult by the proprietress: it was before the days of real Chinese ware for any of us, but Rossetti's (age 31) fine collection in later days may be traced back to his first quest after these despised "kitchen plates."

It would be hard to say when Madox Brown found time for painting the pictures that we know, for he was the very sport of distraction, letting people come up to chat in his studio, which was not large enough for himself, and being lured downstairs, palette on thumb, by the sound of the piano if it played a tune that he liked, to the oblivion of everything else. His manner of talking was characteristic — very slow and distinct. Though he recollected facts well and held the attention of his hearers by endless tales of his own experience or original refledions upon life, he had an incapacity for remembering names which, while endearing him to us all, made havoc of some of his remarks. At other times, if the word itself was not wrong, he would vary its accent, but in either case it would be uttered with such deliberation that there was no doubt as to the change which had been wrought. "Have you heard," he asked in measured tones one evening, "of a novel called The Mill on the Floss, by Miss Atkinson?" "Miss Atkinson, my dear fellow — it's Miss Evans!" rose from the listening circle. His brow clouded, and more slowly than before he answered, "Well, Atkinson or Evans, it's the same thing!" And we agreed that it was, and that if Michael himself were to weigh the names in a balance the poise would be found equal. Another time, talk falling upon Mary Queen of Scots, his listeners could hardly trust their delighted ears when Madox Brown, after reviewing the character of the lovers of the luckless lady that are known to history, summed up the matter by saying deliberately, "There's no doubt that she had a real feeling for Boswell."

Before my visit came to an end Madox Brown (age 38) had decided that Edward had better be married without further delay, and since his charader as counsellor stood high and we had no arguments to oppose to the suggestion, it was suddenly settled. I wrote to my mother to the effect that so much of me had already left her kind hands that I prayed her now to set the rest free, and she and my father consented, asking Edward no questions, but committing us both to the care of God.

Before 23 May 1860. Since the time that Rossetti (age 32) was called away from Oxford, in October, 1857, by the illness of Miss Siddal (age 30), he and Edward (age 26) had been less together, but there had been no decrease of affection between them, and so it was of the most vital interest to us when we learnt that Gabriel (age 32) was to be married about the same time as ourselves. He and Edward at once built up a plan for our all four meeting in Paris as soon as possible afterwards; I went home to Manchester to make my preparations, and it was decided that the fourth anniversary of our engagement, the 9th of June, should be our wedding-day. The conditions on which we started life were, practically no debts, except of work to Mr. Flint, and the possession of about £30 in ready money; and I brought with me a small deal table with a drawer in it that held my wood-engraving tools. Three days before our marriage, however, came a note from the unfailing Mr. Flint: "The two pen-and-ink drawings are to hand to-day. I enclose order for £25 which you may need just now." So here was riches.

09 Jun 1860. The 9th of June fell on a Saturday, and we decided to go no further that day than to Chester, where we should see its curious streets and attend service at the Cathedral [Map] on Sunday; Gabriel (age 32) and his wife (age 30) were by this time in Paris [Map], and we hoped to join them a few days later. But this was not in store for us, for unhappily Edward (age 26) had been caught in a rain-storm a day or two before and already had a slight sore-throat, which now so quickly grew worse that by noon on Sunday he was almost speechless from it and in the hands of a strange doctor. This illness was a sharp check, and we found ourselves shut up for some days in a dreary hotel in an unknown place; but a gleam of satisfaction reached us when the doctor spoke of me to Edward (age 26) as "your good lady," and gave me directions about what was to be done for the patient, with no apparent suspicion that I had not often nursed him before. Trusting in this and in some half-used reels of sewing cotton ostentatiously left about, as well as a display of boots which had already been worn, we felt great confidence that no one would guess how ignominiously newly-married we were.

After 09 Jun 1860. It was quite clear that we must give up Paris and get to our own home as soon as the doctor gave Edward (age 26) leave to travel; so ruefully enough I wrote to Gabriel (age 32) and told him how things were; and his answer was a comfort to us, for he reported that they were both tired of "dragging about," and looked forward with pleasure to sitting down again with their friends in London as soon as possible. "Lizzie (age 30) and I are likely to come back with two dogs," he continues, "a big one and a little one. We have called the latter Punch in memory partly of a passage in Pepys's Diary, "But in the street. Lord, how I did laugh to hear poor common persons call their fat child Punch, which name I do perceive to be good for all that is short and thick." We have got the book with us from Mudie's, and meant to have yelled over it in company if you had come to Paris. We are now reading Boswell's Johnson, which is almost as rich in some parts." This reading of Boswell resulted in the water-colour drawing of "Dr. Johnson at the Mitre "which Rossetti brought back with him from Paris.

Samuel Johnson: On 18 Sep 1709 he was born. On 13 Dec 1784 he died.

After 09 Jun 1860. Our own home-coming was informal, for Russell Place had not expected us so soon and was unprepared to receive us; there were no chairs in our dining-room, nor any other furniture that had been ordered except a table. But what did that matter? if there were no chairs there was the table, a good, firm one of oak, sitting upon which the bride received her first visitors, and as the studio was in its usual condition there was a home at once. The boys at the Boys Home in Euston Road had made the table from the design of Philip Webb (age 29), and were busy with chairs and a sofa, which presently arrived. The chairs were high-backed black ones with rush seats, and the companion sofa was of panelled wood painted black. The chairs have disappeared, for they were smaller articles, vigorously used and much moved about, but the table and sofa have always shared the fortunes of their owners and were never superseded: we ate our last meal together at that table and our grandchildren laugh round it now. How modest the scale of our housekeeping was it would be hard to say, and also how rich we felt: "we live in great happiness and thankfulness" was the clue given my friend Charlotte as to our estate.

After 09 Jun 1860. William Allingham (age 36) came over from Ireland this summer, and was, I believe, the first friend I made in my new life. How well I remember his visit, even to where he stood in the room and the way the light fell upon him. He was a distinguished-looking man, though not tall; dark, with a fine cast of face and most Irish eyes - light in the darkness; his thick black hair was brushed close to his head and parted in the middle, but rippled in smooth, close lines that no brush could straighten. He was disposed to convince me that I was a sister of George MacDonald the novelist, for the dramatis personae of his life were of importance to him and this arrangement fitted in well with his conception of their order. His conversation was extremely interesting; serious in manner, with an attractive reserve which yet gave the impression that he cared for sympathy, and an evident minute interest in all that passed before him; a good companion, ready to talk and easily amused. He did not stay long in London, having to return to Ballyshannon, his native place, where at that time he had an appointment in the Customs, but the threefold friendship then begun never ceased.

After In the unsettled week before his marriage Edward (age 26) had amused himself by painting some figures upon a plain deal sideboard which he possessed, and this in its new state was a delightful surprise to find. "Ladies and animals" he called the subjects illustrated, and there were seven pictures, three on the cupboard doors in front and two at each end, which shewed them in various relations to each other. Three kind and attentive ladies were feeding pigs, parrots and fishes; two cruel ones were tormenting an owl by forcing him to look at himself in a round mirror, and gold fish by draining them dry in a net; while two more were expiating such sins in terror at a hideous newt upon the garden path and the assault of a swarm of angry bees. Mrs. Catherwood gave us a piano, made by Priestly of Berners Street, who had patented a small one of inoffensive shape that we had seen and admired at Madox Brown's (age 39) house; we had ours made of unpolished American walnut, a perfectly plain wood of pleasing colour, so that Edward could paint upon it. The little instrument when opened shows inside the lid a very early design for the "Chant d' Amour," and on the panel beneath the keyboard there is a gilded and lacquered picture of Death, veiled and crowned, standing outside the gate of a garden where a number of girls, unconscious of his approach, are resting and listening to music. The lacquering of this panel was an exciting process, for its colour had to be bedeepened by heat while still liquid, and Edward used a red-hot poker for the work.

Rossetti (age 32) and his wife (age 30), after their return from Paris, took a lodging at Hampstead, but she was so ill at first that we never saw her till near the end of July, when to our great delight a day was fixed for the deferred meeting, and Gabriel suggested that it should take place at the Zoological Gardens. "The Wombat's Lair" was the assignation that he gave to the Madox Browns and to us. A mention of this meeting in a letter that I wrote next day gives the impression of the actual time: "She was well enough to see us, and I find her as beautiful as imagination, poor thing."

I wish I could recall more details of that day - of the wombat's reception of us, and of the other beasts we visited - but can only remember a passing call on the owls, between one of whom and Gabriel (age 32) there was a feud. The moment their eyes met they seemed to rush at each other, Gabriel rattling his stick between the cage bars furiously and the owl almost barking with rage. Lizzie's (age 30) slender, elegant figure - tall for those days, but I never knew her actual height - comes back to me, in a graceful and simple dress, the incarnate opposite of the "tailor-made" young lady. We went home with them to their rooms at Hampstead, and I know that I then received an impression which never wore away, of romance and tragedy between her and her husband. I see her in the little upstairs bedroom with its lattice window, to which she carried me when we arrived, and the mass of her beautiful deep-red hair as she took off her bonnet: she wore her hair very loosely fastened up, so that it fell in soft, heavy wings. Her complexion looked as if a rose tint lay beneath the white skin, producing a most soft and delicate pink for the darkest flesh-tone. Her eyes were of a kind of golden brown - agate-colour is the only word I can think of to describe them - and wonderfully luminous: in all Gabriel's drawings of her and in the type she created in his mind this is to be seen. The eyelids were deep, but without any languor or drowsiness, and had the peculiarity of seeming scarcely to veil the light in her eyes when she was looking down.

Whilst we were in her room she shewed me a design she had just made, called "The Woeful Victory" - then the vision passes.

A little later and we were with the Morrises (age 26) in their new house at Upton, and the time we spent together there was one to swear by, if human happiness were doubted.

First was the arrival at Abbey Wood Station, a country place in those days, where a thin fresh air full of sweet smells met us as we walked down the platform, and outside was the wagonette sent from Red House to meet us; then a pull up the hill and a swinging drive of three miles of winding road on the higher land until, passing "Hog's Hole" on the left, we stopped at our friends' gate. I think Morris (age 26) must have brought us down from town himself, for I can see the tall figure of a girl standing alone in the porch to receive us.

It was not a large house, as I have said, but purpose and proportion had been so skilfully observed in its design as to arrange for all reasonable demands and leave an impression of ample space everywhere. It stood facing a little west of north, but the longest line of the building had a sunny frontage of west by south, and beneath its windows stretched a green bowling alley where the men used to play when work was over. For it was by no means on a holiday that Edward had come down, nor only to enjoy the company of his friend again, but that they might consult together about the decoration of the house, of which much is said in the Notes from which I have so often quoted.

The house was strongly built of red brick, and red tiled: the porches were deep and the plan of the house was two sides of a quadrangle. In the angle was a covered well. As we talked of decorating it plans grew apace. We fixed upon a romance for the drawing-room, a great favourite of ours called Sir Degrevaunt. I designed seven pictures from that poem, of which I painted three that summer and autumn in tempera. We schemed also subjects from Troy for the hall, and a great ship carrying Greek heroes for a larger space in the hall, but these remained only as schemes, none were designed except the ship. The great settle from Red lion Square, with the three painted shutters above the scat, was put up at the end of the drawing-room, and there was a ladder to its top and a parapet round it, and a little door above, in the wall behind it, that led into the roof. There at Christmas time it was intended that minstrels should play and sing. I began a picture from the Niebelungen Lied on the inside of one of the shutters of this settle, and Morris painted in tempera a hanging below the Degrevaunt pictures, of bushy trees and parrots and labels on which he wrote the motto he adopted for his life, 'If I can.' He worked hard at this and the room began to look very beautiful."

On one of his visits to Red House Rossetti (age 32) found many of these labels still blank, waiting for the words "If I can," and in his reckless way instantly filled them with another motto, "As I can't." When Morris saw this pleasantry, Edward said, "it would have puzzled the discriminator of words to know which of those two was most eloquent in violent English."

Charles Faulkner (age 27) came down a couple of days after we did, and helped to paint patterns on walls and ceilings, and played bowls in the alley, and in intervals between work joined in triangular bear-fights in the drawing-room. Once, in the middle of a scrimmage that had surged up the steps into the "Minstrels' Gallery" he suddenly leapt clear over the parapet into the middle of the floor with an astounding noise; another time he stored windfallen apples in the gallery and defended himself with them against all comers until a too well-delivered apple gave Morris (age 26) a black eye; and then, remembering that Morris had promised to give away one of his sisters at her marriage a day or two afterwards, Edward and Faulkner left him no peace from their anticipations of the discredit his appearance would bring upon the ceremony.

A few days before this we had been telling each other riddles, and one of us asked, "Who killed his brother Cain?" Morris (age 26) instantly fell into the trap and shouted, "Abel, of course!" amidst a peal of laughter from us all. Afterwards he thought it very funny himself, so on his return from the wedding we were not surprised to learn that he had amused the company at breakfast by trying the trick on some one else. "I asked the parson" - he told us triumphantly - "I asked him 'Who killed his brother Abel?' and when of course he said 'Cain,' I said 'Hah! I knew you'd say that - every one says it.'" And we laughed again, more than before.

Oh, how happy we were, Janey (age 20) and I, busy in the morning with needlework or wood-engraving, and in the afternoon driving to explore the country round by the help of a map of Kent; we went to the Crays one day and to Chislehurst Common another, finding some fresh pleasure everywhere and bringing back tales of our adventures to amuse the men we had left working at home. Sometimes, but not often, they would go with us, for Edward always hated "expeditions," and was only supported in them by good fellowship; nor did he at any time seek the country for its own sake. At this I have often wondered, for the backgrounds of his pictures shew how deeply it touched his imagination and feeling: and I came to the conclusion that one reason why he found so little peace and rest in it might be that he did not, and perhaps could not, submit himself passively to its influence, but was for ever dealing with it as an instrument. In a note written to his father during this very visit to Red House he says, "I hate the country - apples only keep me in good spirits - Topsy's garden is perfectly laden with them." I remember his dread of anything that appealed to the sadness which he shared with all imaginative natures, who "don't need to be made to feel," he said, and I believe that this "hatred" was partly an instinct of self-preservation from the melancholy of autumn in the country.

The Niebelungen Lied design of which Edward speaks was never finished, and if it was begun upon the back of either of the beautiful "Salutations of Beatrice" which Rossetti (age 32) painted on the outside of the doors of the big settle, it may perhaps still remain there.

It will be taken for granted that the two men visitors had endless jokes together at the expense of their beloved host. The dinner hour, at middle day, was a great time for them because Mrs. Morris (age 20) and I were there, either as eager onlookers at the fun or to take sides for and against The dining-room was not yet finished, and the drawing-room upstairs, whose beautiful ceiling had been painted by Mr. and Mrs. Morris, was being decorated in different ways, so Morris' studio, which was on the same floor, was used for living in, and a most cheerful place it was, with windows looking three ways and a little horizontal slip of a window over the door, giving upon the red-tiled roof of the house where we could see birds hopping about all unconscious of our gaze.

Perhaps the joke which made two out of the three men happiest at dinner-time was that of sending Morris to Coventry for some slight cause and refusing to exchange a word with him at his own table: it was carried on with an unflinching audacity that I cannot hope to describe, and occasionally reached the height of their asking Mrs. Morris (age 20) if she would be good enough to communicate with her husband for them and tell him anything they wished to say - but a stranger coming in upon our merriment would never have guessed from the faces of the company who were the teasers and who the teased.

After work, when it was dark, sometimes there was a game of hide-and-seek all over the house. A fragment of one of these games remains in my memory, and I see that Edward, leaving the door open behind him, has slipped into an unlighted room and disappeared into its black depths for so long that Mrs. Morris (age 20), who is the seeker, grows almost terrified. I see her tall figure and her beautiful face as she creeps slowly nearer and nearer to the room where she feels sure he must be, and at last I hear her startled cry and his peal of laughter as he bursts from his hiding-place. There was a piano in the sitting-room, and in the evenings we had music of a simple kind — chiefly the old English songs published by Chappell and the inexhaustible Echos du Temps Passé.

Many flowering creepers had been planted against the walls or the house from the earliest possible time, so that there was no look of raw newness about it; and the garden, beautified beforehand by the apple-trees, quickly took shape. In front of the house it was spaced formally into four little square gardens making a bie square together; each of the smaller squares had a wattled fence round it with an opening by which one entered, and all over the fence roses grew thickly. The stable, with stalls for two horses, stood in one corner of the garden, end on to the road, and had a kind of younger-brother look with regard to the house. The deep porches that Edward mentions were at the front and the back of the house; the one at the back was practically a small garden-room. There was a solid table in it, painted red, and fixed to the wall was a bench where we sat and talked or looked out into the well-court, of which two sides were formed by the house and the other two by a tall rose-trellis. This little court with its beautiful high-roofed brick well in the centre summed up the feeling of the whole place.

One morning as Janey (age 20) and I sat sewing (she was an exquisite needlewoman) I saw in her basket a strange garment, fine, small, and shapeless — a little shirt for him or her — and looking at my friend's face I knew that she had been happy when she made it; but it was a sign of change, and the thought of any change made me sigh. We paid other visits to the Morrises after this, but none quite like it — how could they be?

Speaking of Red House in the Notes Edward says: "It was from the necessity of furnishing this house that the firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., took its rise. There were the painted chairs and the great settle of which mention has been made already, but these went only a little way. The walls were bare and the floors; nor could Morris have endured any chair, table, sofa or bed, nor any hangings such as were then in existence. I think about this time Morris' income that was derived from copper mines began to diminish fast, and the idea came to him of beginning a manufactory of all things necessary for the decoration of a house. Webb had already designed some beautiful tableglass, made by Powell of Whitefriars, metal candlesticks, and tables for Red House, and I had already designed several windows for churches, so the idea grew of putting our experiences together for the service of the public. For the fireplaces at Red House I designed painted tiles, but the floors were covered with Eastern carpets, for it was some years afterwards when Morris added that industry to his many others. For the walls of other rooms than the drawing-room at Red House Morris designed flower-patterns, which his wife worked in wool on a dark ground, and it was a beautiful house."

Before we left in October Edward had finished his three pictures, but unfortunately the walls were new and not properly prepared for painting, and, as in the case of the Union, the colour soon faded in patches. For him, whose work was so interwoven with his life, what memories must have risen up when thirty-seven years later he made for the Kelmscott Press another design from this same Romance of Sir Degrevaunt. He was often a little hard upon his own early pictures, and did not wish to see them again, but I never remember hearing him quarrel with their subjects — also he said, "The first stammerings I knew had all the imagination that is in me to feel, only I can say it better as time goes on."

In the winter of 1892-3, when the New Gallery exhibited as complete a collection of his work as was possible, he was for a time really disturbed, and a letter that he wrote about it recalls so clearly the spirit of the years with which we are now dealing, and ends with so beautiful a vision of the friendship between himself and Morris in later life, that it may well be given here.

"Why did I dread Wednesday? Only because I had to go to the New Gallery to look at ancient work of mine — and I dreaded it and came back deeply disheartened about myself and feeling to the chilled marrow of me that it had been a poor futile life. Perhaps it will cheer one or two young fellows to see how poor and faint my beginnings were — a little twitter at dawn — but I am far away from noontide yet; I wonder if I shall live to do the thing that I want — there isn't much time left. I think I had no equipment but longing — that I had, but nothing else. I want to forget it. Is all this a phase of vanity? I don't think that I want a perfed thing and can't forgive imperfedion at all, and my faults and sins, which are many, scream at me, and drown the praise. Can't help it, made like that. And I won't think of this show or look at it, or talk of it — if a young thing or two, some such fantastical creature as I was at twenty, goes and gets help, that is enough. And now no more of it. This morning Morris brought fresh life to me — for all the week my head had been low in the dust — and he talked of the high things till I forgot my abasement."

"I am home again now for the next two months," Edward writes to his father in Odober, 1860. "I want to work and not stir out if possible at all. How soon can I have those frames? I am waiting for two of them now to sell the drawings they belong to — it makes such a difference having them in frames, that I don't care to shew them without." I think the drawings referred to were the little water-colours of "Sidonia" and "Clara Von Bork" which he had made before we went to Upton, and the father was very happy in framing his son's pictures, but, alas, any original design which must be exactly carried out baffled the skill of his small workshop, and Edward had gently and by degrees to let the arrangement drop through. A mirror still exists, made by Mr. Jones with his own hands, and intended to be a ring of small round mirrors placed at equal distances from each other, and encircling a larger one. The measurement of the spaces, however, was faulty, and destroyed the efFcA of the design. It is painted in the little water-colour of "Rosamond's Bower," with the fierce face of Queen Eleanor refleded in each separate disc.

Swinburne was the next remarkable personality I remember in these days; he had rooms very near us and we saw a great deal of him ; sometimes twice or three times in a day he would come in, bringing his poems hot from his heart and certain of welcome and a hearing at any hour. His appearance was very unusual and in some ways beautiful, for his hair was glorious in abundance and colour and his eyes indescribably fine. When repeating poetry he had a perfectly natural way of lifting them in a rapt, unconscious gaze, and their clear green colour softened by thick brown eyelashes was unforgettable: "Looks commercing with the skies" expresses it without exaggeration. He was restless beyond words, scarcely standing still at all and almost dancing as he walked, while even in sitting he moved continually, seeming to keep time, by a swift movement of the hands at the wrists, and sometimes of the feet also, with some inner rhythm of excitement. He was courteous and afiFeftionate and unsuspicious, and faithful beyond most people to those he really loved. The biting wit which filled his talk so as at times to leave his hearers dumb with amazement always spared one thing, and that was an absent friend.

There was one subject which in these days he raised our hopes that he might deal with; but the time passed, and now we shall never see his proposed Diary of Mrs. Samuel Pepys, kept concurrently with that of her husband.

Dear Lizzie Rossetti (age 30) laughed to find that she and Swinburne had such shocks of the same coloured hair, and one night when we went in our thousands to see "Colleen Bawn," she declared that as she sat at one end of the row we filled and he at the other, a boy who was selling books of the play looked at Swinburne and took fright, and then, when he came round to where she was, started again with terror, muttering to himself "There 's another of 'em!" Gabriel commemorated one view of her appearance in his rhyme beginning "There is a poor creature named Lizzie, Whose aspect is meagre and frizzy," and there, so far as I remember, his muse halted ; but he completed another verse on her to her great satisfaction, thus:

There is a poor creature named Lizzie,

Whose pictures are dear at a tizzy;

And of this the great proof

Is that all stand aloof

From paying that sum unto Lizzie.

He almost blamed me personally for the difficulty he had in finding any rhyme for my name except the classical "Porgie," and never rested until one day he called for sympathy, and received it, on rolling forth in his majestic voice, "There is a poor creature named Georgie, Whose life is one profligate orgy," after which his course was clear. Mr. Price came to London this summer and took a lodging opposite to us, which allowed of our meeting continually, and we hoped to keep near each other all through his hospital course; but not long after our return from Upton we found to our dismay that this fair prospect was changed, for he had resolved to give up the profession he had chosen and to accept a private tutorship in Russia, which would give him an immediate income. The engagement, if satisfactory, was to last for seven years, and we had hardly realized the thought before our friend was gone. I do not think Cormell personally regretted his change of profession very much, for the experience of the dissefting-room was a terrible one to his nature, but the difference between daily intercourse and an occasional letter written and received on either side was a sad one both to him and to us. Of his brief apprenticeship to medicine a trace remains in one of Gabriel's verses, which ran (in allusion to a legend cherished, if not created, by his friends):

There is a young Dodor named Crom,

Whom you get very little good from.

If his pockets you jog.

The inside of a dog

Is certain to trickle from Crom.

Rossetti's (age 31) descriptions of his friends, usually uttered in their presence, would be a collection of vivid interest and give, in the reading, no faint portrait of himself. Artistic vanity was a subject quite open to his piercing insight, and one day it occurred to him to distribute his friends into various classes of it, beginning with himself and Swinburne and Edward in the first class; Morris, he said, should go into one all by himself. Then Edward wanted to know why he, who was always in trouble about his pictures, should be put in the forefront of the list, and Gabriel said, "Oh, Ned thinks even his pictures aren't good enough for him to have painted." He also said that Edward was the laziest man he knew, and, when called upon to explain this in the face of fact, answered unabashed, "Well, when once you sit down to work you are too lazy even to get up again."

The question of her long years of ill-health has often puzzled me; as to how it was possible for her to suffer so much without ever developing a specific disease; and after putting together what I knew of her and what I have learnt in passing through life, it seems to me that Dr. Acland's diagnosis of her condition in 1855 must have been shrewd, sympathetic, and true. He is reported by Gabriel as saying, after careful examination and many professional visits, that her lungs, if at all affected, were only slightly so, and that he thought the leading cause of her illness lay in "mental power long pent up and lately overtaxed"; which words seem to me a clue to the whole matter. This delicately organized creature, who had spent the first sixteen years of her life in circumstances that practically forbade the unfolding of her powers, had been suddenly brought into the warmth and light of Gabriel's genius and love, under which her whole inner nature had quickened and expanded until her bodily strength gave way; but Rossetti (age 31) himself did not realize this so as to spare her the forcing influence, or restrift his demands upon her imagination and sympathy. It is a tragic enough thought, but one is driven to believe that if such a simple remedy as what is now called a "restcure" had been known of and sought for her then, her life might have been preserved. However, let us follow what we know.

Gabriel dreaded bringing her to live in London, where she was so often ill, but after vainly seeking for a house that would suit them at Hampstead or Highgate they resolved, as she seemed to have gained a little strength since her marriage, to try the experiment of wintering at Blackfriars. The landlord of Chatham Place oflFered them the second floor of the next house in addition to the one that Rossetti (age 31) already had, and by making a communication between the two houses they gained an excellent set of rooms. AH seemed to promise well, and for a brief time I think it was so. We received a note from Gabriel telling us they had "hung up their Japanese brooms," — a kind of yardlong whisk of peacock's feathers — and made a home for themselves. He was happy and proud in putting his wife's drawings round one of the rooms, and in a letter to Allingham says: "Her last designs would I am sure surprise and delight you, and I hope she is going to do better now — if she can only add a little more of the precision in carrying out which it so much needs health and strength to attain, she will, I am sure, paint such pictures as no woman has painted yet."

We used to go and see them occasionally in the evenings, when the two men would spend much of the time in Gabriel's studio, and Lizzie (age 30) and I began to make friends. She did not talk happily when we were alone, but was excited and melancholy, though with much humour and tenderness as well; and Gabriel's presence seemed needed to set her jarring nerves straight, for her whole manner changed when he came into the room. 1 see them now as he took his place by her on the sofa and her excitement sank back into peace.

One evening our errand to Chatham Place was to borrow a lay-figure, and we gaily carried it off without any wrapper in a four-wheeled cab, whose driver soon drew up at a brilliantly lighted public-house, saying that he could go no further, and under the glare of the gas lamps we had to decant our strange companion into a fresh cab.

I never had but one note from Lizzie (age 30), and I kept it for love of her even then. Let it stand here in its whole short length as a memento of one of the Blackfriars evenings, and in the hope that some one beside myself may feel the pathos of its tender playfulness.

My dear little Georgie,

I hope you intend coming over with Ned tomorrow evening like a sweetmeat^ it seems so long since I saw you dear. Janey (age 20) will be here I hope to meet you.

With a willow-pattern dish full of love to you and Ned,

Lizzie (age 30).

Both Edward and I had promised to return to our respeftive families for Christmas, so when the time came we bade each other an eternal adieu, and whilst I was at Manchester he went to Birmingham. He was at Spon Lane with his father both on Christmas Day and the day following, when it is recorded in the journal of the young girl there who watched her friends so closely and sympathetically, "Edward seems to have got very quiet since his new responsibilities." On the last day of the year I rejoined him at his father's house.