. Of course the sonnet was Rossetti's. It is impossible for me
to describe the effect produced upon me by sonnet and exposition. I
resolved not to live many days longer without acquiring a knowledge
of the body of Rossetti's work. Perceiving that the gentleman knew
something of the poet, I put questions to him which elicited the
fact that he had met him many years earlier at, I think he said, Mrs.
Gaskell's, when Rossetti was a rather young man, known only as a painter
and the leader of an eccentric school in art. He described him as a
little dark man, with fine eyes under a broad brow, with a deep voice,
and Bohemian habits--"a little Italian, in short." [Little, by the way,
Rossetti could not properly be said to be, but opinions as to physical
proportions being so liable to vary, I may at once mention that he was
exactly five feet eight inches in height, and except in early manhood,
when he was somewhat attenuated, well built in proportion.] He further
described Rossetti's manners as those of a man in deliberate revolt
against society; delighting in an opportunity to startle well-ordered
persons out of their propriety, and to silence by sheer vehemence of
denunciation the seemly protests of very good and very gentle folk. The
portraiture seems to me now to bear the impress of truth, unlike as it
is in some particulars to the man as I knew him. When once, however,
years after the event recorded, I bantered Rossetti on the amiable
picture of him I had received from a stranger, he admitted that it
was in the main true to his character early in life, and recounted an
instance in which, from sheer perversity, or at best for amusement, he
had made the late Dean Stanley aghast with horror at the spectacle of a
young man, born in a Christian country, and in the nineteenth century,
defending (in sport) the vices of Neronian Home.

The outcome of this first serious and sufficient introduction to
Rossetti's poetry was that I forthwith devoted time to reading and
meditating upon it. Ultimately I lectured twice or thrice on the subject
in Liverpool, first at the Royal Institution, and afterwards at the
Free Library. The text of that lecture I still preserve, and as in all
probability it did more than anything else to originate the friendship I
afterwards enjoyed with the poet, I shall try to convey very briefly an
idea of its purpose.

Against both friendly and unfriendly critics of Rossetti I held that to
place him among the "ae