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In 1849 Rossetti exhibited 'The Girlhood of the Virgin' in the so-called Free Exhibition or Portland Gallery. The artist who had perhaps the strongest influence upon Rossetti's early tastes was Ford Madox Brown, who, however, refused from the first to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on the ground that coteries had in modern art no proper function. Rossetti was deeply impressed with the power and designing faculty displayed by Madox Brown's cartoons exhibited in Westminster Hall. When Rossetti began serious work as a painter he thought of Madox Brown as the one man from whom he would willingly receive practical guidance, and wrote to him at random. From this time Madox Brown became his intimate friend and artistic monitor.

In painting, however, Rossetti was during this time exercising only half his genius. From his childhood it became evident that he was a poet. At the age of five he wrote a sort of play called 'The Slave,' which, as may be imagined, showed no noteworthy characteristic save precocity. This was followed by the poem called 'Sir Hugh Heron,' which was written about 1844, and some translations of German poetry. 'The Blessed Damozel' and 'Sister Helen' were produced in their original form so early as 1846 or 1847. The latter of these has undergone more modifications than any other first-class poem of our time. To take even the new edition of the 'Poems' which appeared last year , the stanzas introducing the wife of the luckless hero appealing to the sorceress for mercy are so important in the glamour they shed back over the stanzas that have gone before, that their introduction may almost be characterized as a rewriting of every previous line.

The translations from the early Italian poets also began as far back as 1845 or 1846, and may have been mainly completed by 1849. Rossetti's gifts as a translator were, no doubt, of the highest. And this arose from his deep sympathy with literature as a medium of human expression: he could enter into the temperaments of other writers, and by sympathy criticize the literary form from the author's own inner standpoint, supposing always that there was a certain racial kinship with the author. Many who write well themselves have less sympathy with the expressional forms adopted by other writers than is displayed by men who have neither the impulse nor the power to write themselves. But this sympathy betrayed him sometimes into a free rendering of locutions such as a translator should be chary of indulging in. Materials for a volume accumulated slowly, but all the important portions of the 'Poems' published in 1870 had been in existence some years before that date. The prose story of 'Hand and Soul' was also written as early as 1848 or 1849.

In the spring of 1860 he married Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, who being very beautiful was constantly painted and drawn by him. She had one still-born child in 1861, and died in February, 1862. He felt her death very acutely, and for a time ceased to write or to take any interest in his own poetry. Like Prospero, indeed, he literally buried his wand, but for a time only. From this time to his death he continued to produce pictures, all of them showing, as far as technical skill goes, an unfaltering advance in his art.

Yet wonderful as was Rossetti as an artist and poet, he was still more wonderful, I think, as a man. The chief characteristic of his conversation was an incisiveness so perfect and clear as to have often the pleasurable surprise of wit. It is so well known that Rossetti has been for a long time the most retired man of genius of our day, and so many absurd causes for this retirement have been spoken of, that there is nothing indecorous in the true cause of it being made public by one who of late years has known more of him, perhaps, than has any other person. About 1868 the curse of the artistic and poetic temperament--insomnia--attacked him, and one of the most distressing effects of insomnia is a nervous shrinking from personal contact with any save a few intimate friends. This peculiar kind of nervousness may be aggravated by the use of sleeping draughts, and in his case was thus aggravated.

But, although Rossetti lived thus secluded, he did not lose the affectionate regard of the illustrious men with whom he started in his artistic life. Nor, assuredly, did he deserve to lose it, for no man ever lived, I think, who was so generous as he in sympathizing with other men's work, save only when the cruel fumes of chloral turned him against everything. And his sympathy was as wide as generous. It was only necessary to mention the name of Leighton or Millais or Madox Brown or Burne Jones or G. F. Watts, or, indeed, of any contemporary painter, to get from him a glowing disquisition upon the merits of each--a disquisition full of the subtlest distinctions, and illuminated by the brilliant lights of his matchless fancy. And it was the same in poetry.

But those who loved Rossetti can realize how difficult it is for me, a friend, to pursue just now such reminiscences as these.

In his preface Mr. W. M. Rossetti says:--

"I have not attempted to write a biographical account of my brother, nor to estimate the range or value of his powers and performances in fine art and in literature. I agree with those who think that a brother is not the proper person to undertake a work of this sort. An outsider can do it dispassionately, though with imperfect knowledge of the facts; a friend can do it with mastery, and without much undue bias; but a brother, however equitably he may address himself to the task, cannot perform it so as to secure the prompt and cordial assent of his readers."

These words will serve as a good example of the dignified modesty which is a characteristic of Mr. W. M. Rossetti's, and is one of the best features of this volume. In these days of empty pretence it is always refreshing to come upon a page written in the spirit of scholarly self-suppression which informs every line this patient and admirable critic writes. And as to the interesting question glanced at in the passage above quoted, though the contents of this volume will, no doubt, form valuable material for the future biography of Rossetti, we wonder whether the time is even yet at hand when that biography, whether written by brother, by friend, or by outsider, is needed. That mysterious entity "the public," would, no doubt, like to get one; but we have always shared Rossetti's own opinion that a man of genius is no more the property of the "public" than is any private gentleman; and we have always felt with him that the prevalence in our time of the opposite opinion has fashioned so intolerable a yoke for the neck of any one who has had the misfortune to pass from the sweet paradise of obscurity into the vulgar purgatory of Fame, that it almost behoves a man of genius to avoid, if he can, passing into that purgatory at all.

Can any biography, by whomsoever written, be other than inchoate and illusory--nay, can it fail to be fraught with danger to the memory of the dead, with danger to the peace of the living, until years have fully calmed the air around the dead man's grave? So long as the man to be portrayed cannot be separated from his surroundings, so long as his portrait cannot be fully and honestly limned without peril to the peace of those among whom he moved--in a word, so long as there remains any throb of vitality in those delicate filaments of social life by which he was enlinked to those with whom he played his part--that brother, or that friend, or that outsider who shall attempt the portraiture must feel what heavy responsibilities are his--must not forget that with him to trip is to sin against the head. And how shall he decide when the time has at last come for making the attempt? Before the incidents of a man's life can be exploited without any risk of mischief, how much time should elapse? "A month," say the publishers, each one of whom runs his own special "biographical series," and keeps his own special bevy of recording angels writing against time and against each other. "Thirty years," said one whose life-wisdom was so perfect as to be in a world like ours almost an adequate substitute for the morality he lacked--Talleyrand.

Of all forms of literary art biography demands from the artist not only the greatest courage, but also the happiest combination of the highest gifts. To succeed in painting the portrait of Achilles or of Priam, of Hamlet or of Othello, may be difficult, but is it as difficult as to succeed in painting the portrait of Browning or Rossetti? Surely not. In the one case an intense dramatic imagination is needed, and nothing more. If Homer's Achaian and Trojan heroes were falsely limned, not they, but Homer's art, would suffer the injury. If for the purposes of art the poet unduly exalted this one or unduly abased that--if he misread one incident in the mythical life of Achilles, and another in the mythical life of Hector--he did wrong to his art undoubtedly, but none to the memory of a dead man, and none to the peace of a living one. But with him who would paint the portrait of Browning or Rossetti how different is the case! Although he requires the poet's vision before he can paint a living picture of his subject, the task he has set himself to do is something more than artistic: before everything else it is fiduciary.

A trustee whose trust fund is biographical truth, he has, after collecting and marshalling all the facts that come to his hand, to decide what is truth as indicated by those generalized facts. But having done this, he has to decide what is the proper time for giving the world the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth--what is the proper time? In the biographer's relation to the dead man on the one-hand and to the public on the other should he be so unhappy as to forget that time is of the very "essence of the contract"--should he forget that so inwoven is human life that truth spoken at the wrong moment may be a greater mischief-worker than error--he may, if conscientious, have to remember that forgetfulness of his during the remainder of his days. He who thinks that truth may not be sometimes as mischievous as a pestilence knows but little of this mysterious and wonderful net of human life. But if this is so with regard to truth, how much more is it so with regard to mere matter of fact? Fact-worship, document-worship, is at once the crowning folly and the crowning vice of our time. To mistake a fact for a truth, and to give the world that; to throw facts about and documents about heedless of the mischief they may work--wronging the dead and wronging the living--this is actually paraded as a virtue in these days.

Here is a case in point. Down to the very last moment of his life Rossetti's feeling towards his great contemporary Tennyson was that of the deepest admiration, and yet what says the documentary evidence as given to the world by Rossetti's brother? It shows that Rossetti used an extremely unpleasant phrase concerning a letter from Tennyson acknowledging the receipt of Rossetti's first volume of poems in 1870. Those who have heard Tennyson speak of Rossetti know that to use this phrase in relation to any letter of his dealing with Rossetti's poetry was to misunderstand it. Yet here are the unpleasant words of a hasty mood, "rather shabby," in print. And why? Because the public has become so demoralized that its feast of facts, its feast of documents it must have, come what will. But even supposing that the public had any rights whatsoever in regard to a man of genius, which we deny, what are letters as indications of a man's character? Of all modes of expression is not the epistolary mode that in which man's instinct for using language "to disguise his thought" is most likely to exercise itself? There is likely to be far more deep sincerity in a sonnet than in a letter. It is no exaggeration to say that the common courtesies of life demand a certain amount of what is called "blarney" in a letter--especially in an eminent man's letter--which would ruin a sonnet. And this must be steadily borne in mind at a time like ours, when private letters are bought and sold like any other article of merchandise, not only immediately after a man's death, but during his lifetime.

With regard to literary men, their letters in former times were simply artistic compositions; hence as indications of character they must be judged by the same canons as literary essays would be judged. In both cases the writer had full space and full time to qualify his statements of opinion; in both cases he was without excuse for throwing out anything heedlessly. Not only in Walpole's case and Gray's, but also in Charles Lamb's, we apply the same rules of criticism to the letters as we apply to the published utterances that appeared in the writer's lifetime. But now, when letters are just the hurried expression of the moment, when ill-considered things--often rash things--are said which either in literary compositions or in conversation would have been, if said at all, greatly qualified--the greatest injustice that can be done to a writer is to print his letters indiscriminately. Especially is this the case with Rossetti. All who knew him speak of him as being a superb critic, and a superb critic he was. But his printed letters show nothing of the kind. On literary subjects they are often full of over-statement and of biased judgment. Here is the explanation: in conversation he had a way of perpetrating a brilliant critical paradox for the very purpose of qualifying it, turning it about, colouring it by the lights of his wonderful fancy, until at last it became something quite different from the original paradox, and full of truth and wisdom. But when such a paradox went off in a letter, there it remained unqualified; and they who, not having known him, scoff at his friends who claim for him the honours of a great critic, seem to scoff with reason.

No one was more conscious of the treachery of letters than was Rossetti himself. Comparatively late in his life he realized what all eminent men would do well to realize, that owing to the degradation of public taste, which cries out for more personal gossip and still more every day, the time has fully come when every man of mark must consider the rights of his friends--when it behoves every man who has had the misfortune to pass into fame to burn all letters; and he began the holocaust that duty to friendship demanded of him. But the work of reading through such a correspondence as his in order to see what letters must be preserved from the burning took more time and more patience than he had contemplated, and the destruction did not progress further than to include the letters of the early sixties. Business letters it was, of course, necessary to preserve, and very properly it is from these that Mr. W. M. Rossetti has mainly quoted.

The volume is divided into two parts: first, documents relating to the production of certain of Rossetti's pictures and poems; and second, a prose paraphrase of 'The House of Life.'

The documents consist of abstracts of and extracts from such portions of Rossetti's correspondence as have fallen into his brother's hands as executor. Dealing as they necessarily do with those complications of prices and those involved commissions for which Rossetti's artistic career was remarkable, there is a commercial air about the first portion of the book which some will think out of harmony with their conception of the painter, about whom there used to be such a mysterious interest until much writing about him had brought him into the light of common day. In future years a summary so accurate and so judicious as this will seem better worth making than it, perhaps, seems at the present moment; for Mr. W. M. Rossetti's love of facts is accompanied by an equally strong love of making an honest statement of facts--a tabulated statement, if possible; and no one writing of Rossetti need hesitate about following his brother to the last letter and to the last figure.

To be precise and perspicuous is, he hints in his preface, better than to be graphic and entertaining; and we entirely agree with him, especially when the subject discussed is Rossetti, about whom so many fancies that are neither precise nor perspicuous are current. Still, to read about this picture being offered to one buyer and that to another, and rejected or accepted at a greatly reduced price after much chaffering, is not, we will confess, exhilarating reading to those to whom Rossetti's pictures are also poems. It does not conduce to the happiness of his admirers to think of such works being produced under such prosaic conditions. One buyer--a most worthy man, to be sure, and a true friend of Rossetti's, but full of that British superstition about the saving grace of clothes which is so wonderful a revelation to the pensive foreigner--had to be humoured in his craze against the nude. After having painted a beautiful partly-draped Gretchen from a new model whose characteristics were a superb bosom and arms, he, Rossetti, was obliged to consent to conceal the best portions of the picture under drapery.

That this was a matter of great and peculiar vexation to him may be supposed when it is remembered that unequalled as had been his good fortune in finding fine face-models , he had in the matter of figure-models been most unlucky. And this, added to his slight knowledge of anatomy, made all his nude pictures undesirable save those few painted from the beautiful girl who stood for 'The Spirit of the Rainbow' and 'Forced Music.' What his work from the nude suffered from this is incalculable, as may be seen in the crayon called 'Ligeia Siren,' a naked siren playing on a kind of lute, which Rossetti described as "certainly one of his best things." The beauty and value of a crayon which for weird poetry--especially in the eyes--must be among Rossetti's masterpieces are ruined by the drawing of the breasts.

The most interesting feature of the book, however, is not that which deals with the prices Rossetti got for his pictures, but that which tells the reader the place where and the conditions under which they were painted; and no portion of the book is more interesting than that which relates to the work done at Kelmscott:--

The magnificent design here alluded to, 'D?s Manibus,' entirely suggested by the urn, which had somewhat come into his possession , and also 'The Bower Maiden,' suggested by his accidentally seeing a pretty cottage-child lifting some marigolds to a shelf, formed part of the superb work produced by Rossetti during his long retirement at Kelmscott Manor--that period never before recorded, which has at this very moment been brought into prominence by his friend Dr. Hake's sonnet-sequence 'The New Day,' just published. As far as literary and artistic work goes, it was, perhaps, the richest period of his life; and that it was also one of the happiest is clear not only from his own words, but also from the following testimony of Dr. Hake, who saw much of him there:--

O, happy days with him who once so loved us! We loved as brothers, with a single heart, The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us From nature to her blazoned shadow--Art. How often did we trace the nestling Thames From humblest waters on his course of might, Down where the weir the bursting current stems-- There sat till evening grew to balmy night, Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the Strand Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea, That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned Triumphal labours of the day to be.

It was at Kelmscott, in the famous tapestried room, that besides painting the 'Proserpine,' 'The Roman Widow,' &c., he wrote many of his later poems, including 'Rose Mary.'

Considering how deep is Mr. W. M. Rossetti's affection for his brother's memory, and how great is his admiration for his brother's work, it is remarkable how judicial is his mind when writing about him. This is what he says about the much discussed 'Venus Astarte':--

"Into the 'Venus Astarte' he had put his utmost intensity of thinking, feeling, and method--he had aimed to make it equally strong in abstract sentiment and in physical grandeur--an ideal of the mystery of beauty, offering a sort of combined quintessence of what he had endeavoured in earlier years to embody in the two several types of 'Sibylla Palmifera' and 'Lilith,' or 'Soul's Beauty' and 'Body's Beauty.' It may be well to remark that, by the time when he completed the 'Venus Astarte,' or 'Astarte Syriaca,' he had got into a more austere feeling than of old with regard to colour and chiaroscuro; and the charm of the picture has, I am aware, been less, to many critics and spectators of the work, than he would have deemed to be its due, as compared with some of his other performances of more obvious and ostensible attraction."

Though Mr. W. M. Rossetti is right in saying that it was not till the beginning of 1877 that this remarkable picture was brought to a conclusion, the main portions were done during that long sojourn at Bognor in 1876-7, which those who have written about Rossetti have hitherto left unrecorded. Having fallen into ill health after his return to London from Kelmscott, he was advised to go to the seaside, and a large house at Bognor was finally selected. No doubt one reason why the preference was given to Bognor was the fact that Blake's cottage at Felpham was close by, for businesslike and unbusiness-like qualities were strangely mingled in Rossetti's temperament, and it was generally some sentiment or unpractical fancy of this kind that brought about Rossetti's final decision upon anything. Blake's name was with him still a word to charm with, and he was surprised to find, on the first pilgrimage of himself and his friends to the cottage, that scarcely a person in the neighbourhood knew what Blake it was that "the Londoners" were inquiring about.

That this should be a new experience to so fine a poet as Rossetti was no doubt strange, but so it chanced to be. He whose talk at Kelmscott had been of 'Blessed Damozels' and 'Roman Widows' and the like, talked now of the wanderings of Ulysses, of 'The Ancient Mariner,' of 'Sir Patrick Spens,' and even of 'Arthur Gordon Pym' and 'Allan Gordon.' And on hearing a friend recite some tentative verses on a great naval battle, he looked about for sea subjects too; and it was now, and not later, as is generally supposed, that he really thought of the subject of 'The White Ship,' a subject apparently so alien from his genius. Every evening he used to take walks on the beach for miles and miles, delighted with a beauty that before had had no charms for him. Still, the 'Astarte Syriaca' did progress, though slowly, and became the masterpiece that Mr. W. M. Rossetti sets so high among his brother's work.

"From Bognor my brother returned to his house in Cheyne Walk; and in the summer he paid a visit to two of his kindest and most considerate friends, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, at their seat of Broadlands in Hampshire. He executed there a portrait in chalks of Lady Mount-Temple. He went on also with the picture of 'The Blessed Damozel.' For the head of an infant angel which appears in the front of this picture he made drawings from two children--one being the baby of the Rev. H. C. Hawtrey, and the other a workhouse infant. The former sketch was presented to the parents of the child and the latter to Lady Mount-Temple; and the head with its wings, was painted on to the canvas at Broadlands."

Mr. W. M. Rossetti omits to mention that the landscape which forms the predella to 'The Blessed Damozel,' a river winding in a peculiarly tortuous course through the cedars and other wide-spread trees of an English park, was taken from the scenery of Broadlands--that fairyland of soft beauty which lived in his memory as it must needs live in the memory of every one who has once known it. But the wonder is that such a mass of solid material has been compressed into so small a space.

Mr. W. M. Rossetti's paraphrase of 'The House of Life'--done with so much admiration of his brother's genius and affection for his memory--touches upon a question relating to poetic art which has been raised before--raised in connexion with prose renderings of Homer, Sophocles, and Dante: Are poetry and prose so closely related in method that one can ever be adequately turned into the other? Schiller no doubt wrote his dramas in prose and then turned them into rhetorical verse; but then there are those who affirm that Schiller's rhetorical verse is scarcely poetry. The importance of the question will be seen when we call to mind that if such a transmutation of form were possible, translations of poetry would be possible; for though, owing to the tyrannous demands of form, the verse of one language can never be translated into the verse of another, it can always be rendered in the prose of another, only it then ceases to be poetry.

That the intellectual, and even to some extent the emotional, substance of a poem can be seized and covered by a prose translation is seen in Prof. Jebb's rendering of the 'OEdipus Rex'; but, as we have before remarked, the fundamental difference between imaginative prose and poetry is that, while the one must be informed with intellectual life and emotional life, the other has to be informed with both these kinds of life, and with another life beyond these--rhythmic life. Now, if we wished to show that rhythmic life is in poetry the most important of all, our example would, we think, be Mr. W. M. Rossetti's prose paraphrase of his brother's sonnets. The obstacles against the adequate turning of poetry into prose can be best understood by considering the obstacles against the adequate turning of prose into poetry. Prose notes tracing out the course of the future poem may, no doubt, be made, and usefully made, by the poet , unless, indeed, the notes form too elaborate an attempt at a full prose expression of the subject-matter, in which case, so soon as the poet tries to rise on his winged words, his wingless words are likely to act as a dead weight. For this reason, when Wordsworth said that the prose notes should be brief, he might almost as well have gone on to say that in expression they should be slovenly. This at least may be said, that the moment the language of the prose note is so "adequate" and rich that it seems to be what Wordsworth would call the natural "incarnation of the thought," the poet's imagination, if it escapes at all from the chains of the prose expression, escapes with great difficulty. An instance of this occurred in Rossetti's own experience.

During one of those seaside rambles alluded to above, while he was watching with some friends the billows tumbling in beneath the wintry moon, some one, perhaps Rossetti himself, directed attention to the peculiar effect of the moon's disc reflected in the white surf, and compared it to fire in snow. Rossetti, struck with the picturesqueness of the comparison, made there and then an elaborate prose note of it in one of the diminutive pocket-books that he was in the habit of carrying in the capacious pocket of his waistcoat. Years afterwards--shortly before his death, in fact--when he came to write 'The King's Tragedy,' remembering this note, he thought he could find an excellent place for it in the scene where the king meets the Spae wife on the seashore and listens to her prophecies of doom. But he was at once confronted by this obstacle: so elaborately had the image of the moon reflected in the surf been rendered in the prose note--so entirely did the prose matter seem to be the inevitable and the final incarnation of the thought--that it appeared impossible to escape from it into the movement and the diction proper to poetry. It was only after much labour--a labour greater than he had given to all the previous stanzas combined--that he succeeded in freeing himself from the fetters of the prose, and in painting the picture in these words:--

That eve was clenched for a boding storm 'Neath a toilsome moon half seen; The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high; And where there was a line of sky, Wild wings loomed dark between.

'Twas then the moon sailed clear of the rack On high on her hollow dome; And still as aloft with hoary crest Each clamorous wave rang home, Like fire in snow the moonlight blazed Amid the champing foam.

And the remark was then made to him with regard to Coleridge's 'Wanderings of Cain,' that it is not unlikely the matchless fragment given in Coleridge's poems might have passed nearer towards completion, or at least towards the completion of the first part, had it not been for those elaborate and beautiful prose notes which he has left behind.

And if the attempt to turn prose into poetry is hopeless, the attempt to turn poetry into prose is no less so, and for a like reason--that of the immense difficulty of passing from the movement natural to one mood into the movement natural to another. And this criticism applies especially to the poetry of Rossetti, which produces so many of its best effects by means not of logical statement, but of the music and suggestive richness of rhythmical language. That Rossetti did on some occasions, when told that his sonnets were unintelligible, talk about making such a paraphrase himself is indisputable, because Mr. Fairfax Murray say that he heard him say so. But indisputable also is many another saying of Rossetti's, equally ill-considered and equally impracticable. That he ever seriously thought of doing so is most unlikely.

In his memoir of his brother, Mr. William Michael Rossetti thus makes mention of a ballad left by the poet which still remains unpublished:--

"It is most fully worthy of publication, but has not been included in Rossetti's 'Collected Works,' because he gave the MS. to his devoted friend Mr. Theodore Watts, with whom alone now rests the decision of presenting it or not to the public."

And he afterwards mentions certain sonnets on the Sphinx, also in my possession.

With the most generous intentions my dear and loyal friend William Rossetti has here brought me into trouble.

Naturally such an announcement as the above has excited great curiosity among admirers of Rossetti, and I am frequently receiving letters--some of them cordial enough, but others far from cordial--asking, or rather demanding, to know the reason why important poems of Rossetti's have for so long a period been withheld from the public. In order to explain the delay I must first give two extracts from Mr. Hall Caine's picturesque 'Recollections of Rossetti,' published in 1882:--

"The end was drawing near, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a facetious ballad , of the length of 'The White Ship,' called 'Jan Van Hunks,' embodying an eccentric story of a Dutchman's wager to smoke against the devil. This was to appear in a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Theodore Watts, a project which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and in which he now, in his last moments, took a revived interest, strange and strong."

"On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets which he had composed on a design of his called 'The Sphinx,' and which he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned. On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from that cause hardly intelligible."

As the facts in connexion with this project exhibit, with a force that not all the words of all his detractors can withstand, the splendid generosity of the poet's nature, I only wish that I had made them public years ago, Rossetti had for years been urging me to publish certain writings of mine with which he was familiar, and for years I had declined to do so--declined for two simple reasons: first, though I liked writing for its own sake--indulged in it, indeed, as a delightful luxury--to enter formally the literary arena, and to go through that struggle which, as he himself used to say, "had never yet brought comfort to any poet, but only sorrow," had never been an ambition of mine; and, secondly, I was only too conscious how biased must the judgment be of a man whose affections were so strong as his when brought to bear upon the work of a friend.

In order at last to achieve an end upon which he had set his heart, he proposed that he and I should jointly produce the volume to which Mr. Hall Caine refers, and that he should enrich it with reproductions of certain drawings of his, including the 'Sphinx' and crayons and pencil drawings in my own possession illustrating poems of mine--those drawings, I mean, from that new model chosen by me whose head Leighton said must be the loveliest ever drawn, who sat for 'The Spirit of the Rainbow,' and that other design which William Sharp christened 'Forced Music.'

In order to conquer my most natural reluctance to see a name so unknown as mine upon a title-page side by side with a name so illustrious as his, he italianized the words Walter Theodore Watts into "Gualtiero Teodoro Gualtieri"--a name, I may add in passing, which appears as an inscription on one at least of the valuable Christmas presents he made me, a rare old Venetian Boccaccio. My portion of the book was already in existence, but that which was to have been the main feature of the volume, a ballad of Rossetti's to be called 'Michael Scott's Wooing' , hung fire for this reason: the story upon which the ballad was to have been based was discovered to be not an old legend adapted and varied by the Romanies, as I had supposed when I gave it to him, but simply the Ettrick Shepherd's novelette 'Mary Burnet'; and the project then rested in abeyance until that last illness at Birchington painted so graphically and pathetically by Mr. Hall Caine.

For some reason quite inscrutable to the late John Marshall, who attended him, and to all of us, this old idea seized upon his brain; so much so, indeed, that Marshall hailed it as a good omen, and advised us to foster it, which we did with excellent results, as will be seen by referring to the very last entry in his mother's touching diary as lately printed by Mr. W. M. Rossetti: "March 28, Tuesday. Mr. Watts came down. Gabriel rallied marvellously."

Though the ballad, in Rossetti's own writing, has ever since remained in my possession, as have also the two sonnets in the MS. of another friend who has since, I am delighted to know, achieved fame for himself, no one who enjoyed the intimate friendship of Rossetti need be told that his death took from me all heart to publish.

Time, however, is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrow himself, bows at last. The rights of Rossetti's admirers can no longer be set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within the present year 'Jan Van Hunks' and the 'Sphinx Sonnets,' the former of which will show a new and, I think, unexpected side of Rossetti's genius.

It is a sweet and comforting thought for every poet that, whether or not the public cares during his life to read his verses, it will after his death care very much to read his letters to his mistress, to his wife, to his relatives, to his friends, to his butcher, and to his baker. And some letters are by that same public held to be more precious than others. If, for instance, it has chanced that during the poet's life he, like Rossetti, had to borrow thirty shillings from a friend, that is a circumstance of especial piquancy. The public likes--or rather it demands--to know all about that borrowed cash. Hence it behoves the properly equipped editor who understands his duty to see that not one allusion to it in the poet's correspondence is omitted. If he can also show what caused the poet to borrow those thirty shillings--if he can by learned annotations show whether the friend in question lent the sum willingly or unwillingly, conveniently or inconveniently--if he can show whether the loan was ever repaid, and if repaid when--he will be a happy editor indeed. Then he will find a large and a grateful public to whom the mood in which the poet sat down to write 'The Blessed Damosel' is of far less interest than the mood in which he borrowed thirty shillings.

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