The craving for this intoxicant, once it becomes a habit, is, like the use of morphia, invincible, and Rossetti indulged in it to such an extent that he used to take the original prescription to several druggists to obtain a quantity that one would not have given him.  The crisis came long after my close personal relations with him had ceased, and I had become only an occasional correspondent, living in Italy.  But to make his decline the consequence of the use of chloral, even when it was finally become habitual, as some do, is absurd.  It had been prescribed for him by a competent physician, because some remedy for his malady had become necessary.  Even before I had recommended his first experiment with it he had been incapacitated from work by sleeplessness, and was in a very precarious condition of nerves and brain, and, though he recovered at Robertsbridge a comparative health, so that he was enabled to do some of his best work, his return to London, and gradually to his old habits of life and work, ultimately reproduced the old symptoms.

During the earlier days of the return of the malady I was in London again and saw a great deal of him, was witness to his having become subject to illusions, and heard his declarations that he was beset by enemies and that he continually heard them in an adjoining room conspiring to attack him, and he attributed the savage criticism of Buchanan on his volume of poems to his being in the conspiracy to ruin him.  The attack of Buchanan had a most disastrous effect on his mind.  It was the first time that Rossetti had experienced the brutalities of criticism, and his sensitiveness was excessive.  No reassurance had any effect; he had heard, he declared, the voices of those who had combined to ruin his reputation discussing the measures they were going to take, and it was evident that it had become a mania closely resembling insanity.  Buchanan’s criticism had a rancor and breath of personality in it which had no excuse; it was a savage, wanton attack on the poet which he felt not only as poet and artist but as personal; for, to Rossetti, the two were the silver and golden sides of the shield.  Though the morbid state was there, I think that the article of Buchanan had more to do with the intensification of the mania of persecution than anything else that occurred.  And at that time he had not yet contracted the habit of taking chloral.

In the diary of Ford Madox Brown, published by William Rossetti, there is an amusing story of Dante’s keeping Brown’s overcoat, and keeping the room needed for other occupants, with the unconscious oblivion of any other convenience than his own, which was quite characteristic of the man, and which was shown on a larger scale at Robertsbridge.  He not only took possession of whatever part of the house pleased him best, but, without in the least consulting me, he invited his friends to come and occupy it.  As the agreement was that we should pay share and share alike of the expense, and as I invited no one,