veys the idea
of a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The
face is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated
and slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to
them in later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of
moustache or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful
intellect and ambitious nature at war with surroundings and not wholly
satisfied with the results. It ought to be added that, at the period in
question, health was uncertain with Rossetti: and this fact, added to
the circumstance of his being at the time in the very throes of those
difficulties with his art which he was soon to surmount, must be
understood to account for the austerity of his early portrait. Rossetti
was not in a distinct sense a humourist, but there came to him at
intervals, in earlier manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to
serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the
powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described as almost
boyish in recklessness, plunging into any madcap escapade that might be
afoot with heedlessness of all consequences. Stories of misadventures,
quips and quiddities of every kind, were then his delight, and of these
he possessed a fund which no man knew better how to use. He would tell
a funny story with wonderful spirit and freshness of resource, always
leading up to the point with watchful care of the finest shades of
covert suggestion or innuendo, and, when the climax was reached, never
denying himself a hearty share in the universal laughter. One of his
choicest pleasures at a dinner or other such gathering was to improvise
rhymes on his friends, and of these the fun usually lay in the
improvisatore's audacious ascription of just those qualities which his
subject did not possess. Though far from devoid of worldly wisdom, and
indeed possessed of not a little shrewdness in his dealings with his
buyers (often exhibiting that rarest quality of the successful trader,
the art of linking one transaction with another), he was sometimes
amusingly deficient in what is known as common sense. In later life he
used to tell with infinite zest a story of a blunder of earlier years
which might easily have led to serious if not fatal results. He had
been suffering from nervous exhaustion and had been ordered to take a
preparation of nux vomica. The dose was to be taken three times d