after the trying ordeal had
been passed, or immediately before the threatened intrusion had been
consummated.

Early in our correspondence a friend of his, an art critic of
distinction, visited Liverpool with the purpose of lecturing on the
valuable examples of Byzantine art in the Eoyal Institution of that
city. The lecture was, I fear, almost too good and quite too technical
for some of the hearers, many of whom claim (and with reason) to be
lovers of art, and cover the walls of their houses with beautiful
representations of lovely landscape, but at the same time erect huge
furnaces which emit vast volumes of black smoke such as prevent the sky
of any Liverpool landscape being for an instant lovely. I doubt if the
lecture could have been treated more popularly, but there was manifestly
a lack of merited appreciation. The archaisms of some of the pictures
chosen for illustration (early Byzantine examples exclusively) appeared
to cause certain of the audience to smile at much of the lecturer's
enthusiasm. Fortunately the man chiefly concerned seemed unconscious of
all this. And indeed, however he fared in public, in private he was only
too "dreadfully attended." After the lecture a good many folks gave him
the benefit of their invaluable opinions on various art questions, and
some, as was natural, made pitiful slips. I observed with secret and
scarcely concealed satisfaction his courageous loyalty in defence of his
friends, and his hitting out in their defence when he believed them to
be assailed. One superlative intelligence, eager to do honour to the
guest, yet ignorant of his claim to such honour, gave him a wonderfully
facile and racy comment on the pre-Raphaelite painters, and, in
particular, made the ridiculous blunder of a deliberate attack upon
Rossetti, and then paused for breath and for the lecturer's appreciative
response; of course, Rossetti's friend was not to be drawn into such
disloyalty for an instant, even to avoid the risk of ruffling the
plumage of the mightiest of the corporate cacklers. Rossetti had
permitted me in his name to meet his friend, and in writing subsequently
I alluded to the affection with which he had been mentioned, also to
something that had been said of his immediate surroundings, and to that
frank championing of his claims which I have just described. Rossetti's
reply to this is interesting as affording a pathetic view of his
isolation of life and of the natural affectionateness o