glad to exhibit his pictures with those of the old masters, as they would teach him something about his own.  Like every other really great artist, he had a very just appreciation of the work of other men, and his criticisms were, me judice, very sound and broad from the point of view of art; the only painter of any note I ever heard him speak of with strong dislike was Brett, whom he could not tolerate.  But he had a higher opinion of his own natural abilities than of his actual achievement,—­his self-appreciation was not the conceit of a man who understood only what he himself did, but a full consciousness of what at his best he would be capable of doing and hoped to do before he died.  In my opinion he understood himself and his merits justly, but he was to himself the centre of his own system; other stars might be as great, and probably there were many such, but they were remote, and judged in perspective.

He was undoubtedly the most gifted of his generation of artists, not only in England, where art is, if not exotic, at least sporadic, but in Europe, and I consider that if he had been of Titian’s time he would have been one of the greatest of the Venetians.  His imaginative force and intensity were extraordinary, and some of the elaborate compositions he drew in pen and ink, for future painting, are as remarkable in invention and dramatic feeling as anything I know in art, and all drawn without a model.  The “Hector,” the “Hamlet and Ophelia,” the “Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee,” are designs of unsurpassed power, eminent in all the great qualities of design, harmony of line, invention, and dramatic intensity.  His early work had all the purity and intensity of feeling of the primitive Italians, and the designs alluded to are of a little later period and of his highest imaginative activity.  Had he always maintained the elevation of that period he would have done more and better work, but he fell into irregularities of life which wasted his powers and destroyed the precious exaltation of his early art.  The sensuous quality of his painting, the harmony of color and the play of it, like the same qualities in his poetry, remained as long as I knew anything of his life, but his drawing and even his intellectual powers fell off through his unsystematic, excessive demands on them, night work and overwork.  In his later years his work was nearly always more or less jaded, his eye failing in the perception of forms, as has so often been the case in even the greatest painters in their decay.

No doubt chloral was ultimately one of the agencies of his prostration, though not of his death, but he did not have recourse to it until his power of recuperation from overwork had begun to fail; and, when he had become accustomed to the effect of the chloral, he took it as the means of a form of intoxication, a form well understood by those who have had any experience, personal or by observation, in the use of the drug.