Walk, and I in Percy Street near by, so that there were few days of which a part was not spent with him.  I had made in America, about 1856 or 1857, the acquaintance of Mme. Bodichon, an Englishwoman married to a French physician, who is equally well known by her maiden name, Barbara Leigh-Smith, a landscape painter of remarkable force, and one of the most delightful and remarkable Englishwomen I have ever been privileged to know.  When I knew her in America, she had taken an interest in my painting, which she regarded as promising a successful career, and when I came to England, I renewed the acquaintance.  As the spring came on, she offered me for a few weeks her house at Robertsbridge, a charming cottage in the midst of woodland, and with her consent I asked Rossetti to share it with me.

Rossetti was then in the beginning of the morbid attacks which some time later destroyed his health completely.  He was sleepless, excitable, and possessed by the monomania of persecution.  His family had tried to induce him to go away for a change, but the morbid condition made him unwilling to do so, and he never left his house until late in the evening, under the prepossession of being watched by enemies.  I recommended him to try chloral, then a nearly new remedy which I had used by prescription with excellent effect for my own sleeplessness, and which I always carried with me.  I gave him twenty grains dissolved in water to be taken at three doses, but, as he forgot it on the first two nights, he took the whole on the third, and complained to me the next day that it made him sleep stupidly for a few hours, and then made him so wakeful that he was worse than without it, so that he refused to make any further experiment with it, nor did he at that time, and as long as we remained in touch with each other, venture another trial of it.  At a subsequent time, taking it on the prescription of a physician, he fell into the habit of using it to his great injury, from the want of self-control in the employment of it.  At the time I am writing of, I succeeded in getting him away from London to stay for a long visit at Robertsbridge, where the quiet and long daily walks in the woodland, a simple life and freedom from all causes of excitement, rapidly brought him back to his natural condition, and he resumed work, doing some of his best drawings there, and completing his poems for publication.  Indeed, several of the poems in his first volume were written there.  Sleep returned, and health, with cessation of all the morbid symptoms, the result of overwork and night work, for he used at Cheyne Walk to begin painting in the afternoon, and, lighting a huge gasalier on a standard near his easel, keep at his drawing far into the night, sleeping late the next day.  At Robertsbridge he returned to natural habits, having no gas and falling in with my hours perforce, as otherwise he had no company.