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:

'By the shore a plot of ground
Clips a ruined chapel round,
Buttressed with a grassy mound,
Where day and night and day go by,
And bring no touch of human sound.'

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 I 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.

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

66

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,

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 be forgiven for spoiling a tender lyric by a stanza such as this, which seems scratched with an adamantine pen upon a slab of agate:

'But the sea stands spread As one wall with the flat skies, Where the lean black craft, like flies,

Seem well-nigh stagnated,
Soon to drop off dead.'"

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 " that poor Sordello with the cotto aspetto, '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. "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 you have by you, so compare.

MACCRACKEN.

Getting his pictures, like his supper, cheap,
Far, far away on Belfast by the sea,
MacCracken sleepeth. While the P. R. B.
His scaly, one-eyed, uninvaded sleep

Must keep the shady side, he walks a swell Through spungings of perennial growth and height;

And far away in Belfast out of sight,
By many an open do and secret sell
Fresh daubers he makes shift to scarify,
And fleece with pliant shears the slumb'ring
"green."

There he has lied, though aged, and will lie,
Fattening on ill-got pictures in his sleep,
Till some Preraphael prove for him too deep.
Then once by Hunt and Ruskin to be seen
Insolvent he shall turn, and in the Queen's

Bench die.

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:

As when two men have loved a woman well, Each hating each; and all in all, deceit; Since not for either this straight marriagesheet

But o'er her grave, the night and day dispel

And the long pauses of this wedding-bell;

At last their feud forlorn, with cold and

heat;

Nor other than dear friends to death may fleet

The two lives left which most of her can tell : So separate hopes, that in a soul had wooed

The one same Peace, strove with each other

long;

And Peace before their faces, perish'd since; So from that soul, in mindful brotherhood, (When silence may not be) sometimes they

throng

Through high-streets and at many dusty inns.

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 book 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. 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