twigs I began by suspecting
them of lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicion
that I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to become the greatest
English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenth century and to write
the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he had
designed a little church in the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground
near the Marble Arch. Though I now think his little church a masterpiece,
its style was more than a century too late to hit my fancy, at two or
three and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that eighteenth
century

"That taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied."

Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with two men, who are now my
friends and in certain matters my chief instructors. Somebody, probably
Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of Charles Ricketts and Charles
Shannon, certainly heirs of the great generation, and the first thing I
saw was a Shannon picture of a lady and child, arrayed in lace silk and
satin, suggesting that hated century. My eyes were full of some more
mythological mother and child and I would have none of it and I told
Shannon that he had not painted a mother and child, but elegant people
expecting visitors and I thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing
in _The Germ_ had said that a picture of a pheasant and an apple was
merely a picture of something to eat and I was so angry with the
indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all art criticism
since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else but subject.
I thought that, though it might not matter to the man himself whether he
loved a white woman or a black, a female pickpocket or a regular
communicant of the Church of England, if only he loved strongly, it
certainly did matter to his relations and even under some circumstances to
his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Moliere, I
ignored the lover's feelings altogether and even refused to admit that a
trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of colour, may lend piquancy,
especially if the connection be not permanent.

Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were to live such
passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W.
Rolleston, seemed always out of place; it was I brought him there,
intending t