the burden on me was out of all proportion to our respective means.  Rossetti’s income, according to his own statement, was, at that time, £3000 a year, but he was always in debt.  He denied himself nothing that struck his fancy, and he had the most costly Oriental porcelain in London, and the most beautiful old furniture to be found, and the most princely disregard of expenditure.  I had finally to refuse to continue the life in common.  Dante invited Mr. and Mrs. Ford Madox Brown, and then Mr. and Mrs. Morris, and as they were all excellent friends of mine I could make no objection, though ill able to bear my share of the expense of the ménage incurred, and finally I broke away, leaving him in possession, with Madame Bodichon’s consent.  He was generous to the same degree of extravagance that he was indifferent to the claims of others; he made no more account of giving you a treasured curio than he did of taking it.  His was a sublime and childlike egotism which simply ignored obligations until, by chance, they were made legal, at which, when it happened, he protested like a spoiled child.  And he had been so spoiled by all his friends and exercised such a fascination on all around him, that no one rebelled at being treated in his princely way, for it was only with his friends that he used it.  He dominated all who had the least sympathy with him or his genius.

Had Rossetti’s knowledge of the technique of painting, its science, been equal to his feeling for it, he had certainly founded a school of the truest art; but, for schools, the grammar is the first requisite, and Rossetti had himself never been taught what he would have had to teach.  His feeling for color was on a par with his power of composition, and it seems to me that since Tintoret no one has equaled him in the combination.  Of modern men, I know only Baron Leys and Delacroix who possessed to the same degree the power of spontaneous, harmonious composition, except Turner in landscape; all other modern art has, to my mind, more or less of the pose plastique, the air of the tableau vivant.  His death, at a time when he should have been at the height of his powers, a premature victim of his undisciplined temperament and the irregularities it led him into, coupled with the over-intense mental vivacity, equally undisciplined, is one of the most melancholy incidents in the chaotic artistic movement of our time.

Ford Madox Brown, who was his first master, and is commonly considered to have exercised a great influence on Rossetti, in my opinion had none that was permanent.  He was Rossetti’s antithesis, and in himself as inconsequent as Rossetti was logical.  He was severely and uncompromisingly rationalistic; with the conscience of a Puritan he was an absolute skeptic, with a profound contempt for all religious matters, while Rossetti, with all his irregularities, never could escape from his religious feeling, which was the part of his constitution he possessed in common