Frances Mary Polidori was born at Forty-two Broad Street, Golden Square, the same street in which William Blake was born.  I found the street and Golden Square, but could not locate the house.  The policeman on the beat declared that no one by the name of Rossetti or Blake was in business thereabouts; and further he never heard of Polly Dory.  William Michael Rossetti’s home is one in a row of houses called Saint Edmund’s Terrace.  It is near the Saint John’s Road Station, just a step from Regent’s Park, and faces the Middlesex Waterworks.  It is a fine old house, built of stone I should judge, stuccoed on the outside.  With a well-known critic I called there, and found the master wearing a long dressing-gown that came to his heels, a pair of new carpet slippers and a black plush cap, all so dusty that we guessed the owner had been sifting ashes in the cellar.  He was most courteous and polite.  He worships at the shrine of Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau, and regards America as the spot from whence must come the world’s intellectual hope.  “Great thoughts, like beautiful flowers, are produced by transplantation and the commingling of many elements.”  These are his words, and the fact that the Rossetti genius is the result of transplanting need not weigh in the scale as ’gainst the truth of the remark.  Shortly after this call, at an Art Exhibition, I again met William Michael Rossetti.  I talked with him some moments—­long enough to discover that he was not aware we had ever met.  This caused me to be rather less in love with the Rossetti genius than I was before.

The wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti died, aged twenty-nine, at Fourteen Chatham Place, near Blackfriars Bridge.  The region thereabouts has been changed by the march of commerce, and if the original house where the artist lived yet stands I could not find it.  It was here that the Preraphaelites made history:  Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Ruskin, William Morris and the MacDonalds.  Burne-Jones married one of the MacDonald daughters; Mr. Poynter, now Director of the National Gallery, another; Mr. Kipling still another—­with Rudyard Kipling as a result, followed in due course by Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd, who are quite as immortal as the rest.

At this time Professor Rossetti was dead, and William Michael, Maria, Christina and the widowed mother were living at One Hundred Sixty-six Albany Street, fighting off various hungry wolves that crouched around the door.  Albany Street is rather shabby now, and was then, I suppose.  At One Hundred Twelve Albany Street lives one Dixon, who takes marvelous photographs of animals in the Zoological Gardens, with a pocket camera, and then enlarges the pictures a hundred times.  These pictures go the round world over and command big prices.  Mr. Dixon was taking for me, at the National Gallery, the negatives from which I made photogravures for my Ruskin-Turner book.  Mr. Dixon knows more in an artistic and literary way than any other man in London (I believe), but he is a modest gentleman and only emits his facts under cross-examination or under the spell of inspiration.  Together we visited the house at One Hundred Sixty-six Albany Street.