one.  But Napoleon’s demonic power was of a self-conscious kind.  It would seem, however, that there is another kind of demonic power—­the power of shedding quite unconsciously one’s personality upon all brought into contact with it.  The demonic power of Rossetti, like that of D’Arcy in this story, was quite unconscious.  In Rossetti’s presence, as in D’Arcy’s, it was impossible not to yield to this strange, mysterious power.  At the time when he was not so entirely reclusive as he afterwards became, when he used to meet all sorts of people, the author had many opportunities of noticing its effect upon others.  He has seen them try to resist it, and in vain.  On a certain occasion a very eminent man, much used to society, and much used to the brilliant literary clubs of London, was quite cowed and silenced before Rossetti.  It is necessary to dwell upon these subtle distinctions, because this is the D’Arcy who, as a critic has remarked, ’is the real protagonist of Aylwin—­although the reader does not discover it until the very end of the story, where D’Arcy is the character who unravels and explains all.’  Without D’Arcy, indeed, and the demonic power possessed by him, the story would have no existence.

It is, of course, in the illustrated editions of Aylwin that D’Arcy’s identification with Rossetti and his importance in the story become specially manifest.  On page 204 of the illustrated editions an exact picture has been given by Rossetti’s pupil, Dunn, of the famous studio at 16 Cheyne Walk—­the studio which will always be associated with Rossetti’s name.  It has been immortalized by his friend, Dr. Gordon Hake, in the following lines addressed to the author of Aylwin in the sonnet-sequence, The New Day: 

Sitting with him, his tones as Petrarch’s tender,
With many a speaking vision on the wall,
The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,
Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl—­
Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,
Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,
And Art grew fragrant in the glow of Spring
With homely scents of gorse and heather bloom. 
Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,
Fed by the waters of the forest stream;
Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,
Where they so often fed the poet’s dream;
Or else was mingled the rough billow’s glee
With cries of petrels on a sullen sea.

Again on page 393 of the same editions will be found Miss May Morris’s beautiful water colour of Kelmscott Manor, the country-house jointly occupied by Rossetti and William Morris in which takes place what has been called ‘the crucial scene in Aylwin.’

APPENDIX II

So many questions about the characters depicted in Aylwin were put to the editor of Notes and Queries that he suggested that a key to the novel would he found acceptable.  Some weeks after this suggestion was made there appeared in that journal (7th June 1902) the following contribution by Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, an intimate friend of Rossetti, and of other leading characters of the story.  The republication of it here has been kindly sanctioned by Mr. J. C. Francis, a name so indissolubly associated both with the Athenaeum and Notes and Queries.  Mr. Hake writes as follows: