and died; at
the same house George Eliot, after her marriage with Mr. Cross, had come
to live; at No. 5, in the second street to the westward, Thomas Carlyle
was still living, and a little beyond Cheyne Row stood the modest
cottage wherein Turner died. Rossetti's house had to me the appearance
of a plain Queen Anne erection, much mutilated by the introduction of
unsightly bay-windows; the brickwork seemed to be falling into decay;
the paint to be in serious need of renewal; the windows to be dull with
the accumulation of the dust of years; the sills to bear the suspicion
of cobwebs; the angles of the steps and the untrodden flags of the
courtyard to be here and there overgrown with moss and weeds; and round
the walls and up the reveals of doors and windows were creeping the
tangled branches of the wildest ivy that ever grew untouched by shears.
Such was the exterior of the home of the poet-painter when I walked up
to it on the autumn evening of my first visit, and the interior of the
house was at once like and unlike the exterior. The hall had a puzzling
look of equal nobility and shabbiness. The floor was paved with
beautiful white marble, which however, was partly covered with a strip
of worn cocoa-nut matting; the ceiling was in one of its sections
gracefully groined, and in each of the walls, which were lofty, there
was an arched recess containing a piece of sculpture; an old inlaid
rosewood clock filled a bulkhead on one side facing the door, and on the
corresponding side stood a massive gas branch. A mezzotint lithograph by
Legros was the only pictorial decoration of the walls, which were plain,
and seemed not to have been distempered for many years. Three doors led
out of the hall, one at each side, and one in front, and two corridors
opened into it, but there was no sign of staircase, nor had it any light
except such as was borrowed from the fanlight that looked into the
porch. These facts I noted in the few minutes I stood waiting in the
hall, but during the many months in which subsequently that house was my
own home as well as Rossetti's, I came to see that the changes which the
building must have undergone since the period of its erection, had so
filled it with crooks and corners as to bewilder the most ingenious
observer to account for its peculiarities.

Very soon Rossetti came to me through the doorway in front, which proved
to be the entrance to his studio. Holding forth both hands and crying
'Hulloa,'