eyond all sensitiveness hitherto known
among poets. He who had withheld his pictures from exhibition from dread
of the distracting influences of popular opinion, he who for fifteen
years had withheld his poems from print in obedience first to an
extreme modesty of personal estimate and afterwards to the commands of
a mastering affection was likely enough at forty-two years of age (after
being loaded by the disciples that idolised him with only too much of
the "frankincense of praise and myrrh of flattery") to feel deeply the
slander that he had unpacked his bosom of unhealthy passions. But to say
that Rossetti felt the slander does not express his sense of it. He had
replied to his reviewer and had acted unwisely in so doing; but when
one after one--in the _Quarterly Review, the North American Review_,
and elsewhere, in articles more or less ignorant, uncritical, and
stupid--the accusations he had rebutted were repeated with increased
bitterness, he lost all hope of stemming the torrent of hostile
criticism. He had, as we have seen, for years lived in partial
retirement, enjoying at intervals a garden party behind the house, or
going about occasionally to visit relatives and acquaintances, but now
he became entirely reclusive, refusing to see any friends except the
three or four intimate ones who were constantly with him. Nor did the
mischief end there. We have spoken of his habitual use of chloral,
which was taken at first in small doses as a remedy for insomnia and
afterwards indulged in to excess at moments of physical prostration or
nervous excitement. To that false friend he came at this time with only
too great assiduity, and the chloral, added to the seclusive habit of
life, induced a series of terrible though intermittent illnesses and a
morbid condition of mind in which for a little while he was the victim
of many painful delusions. It was at this time that the soothing
friendship of Dr. Gordon Hake, and his son Mr. George Hake, was of such
inestimable service to Rossetti. Having appeared myself on the scene
much later I never had the privilege of knowing either of these two
gentlemen, for Mr. George Hake was already gone away to Cyprus and Dr.
Hake had retired very much into the bosom of his own family where, as is
rumoured, he has been engaged upon a literary work which will establish
his fame. But I have often heard Mr. Theodore Watts speak with deep
emotion and eloquent enthusiasm of the tender kindness and l