asked if his work usually
took much out of him in physical energy.

"Not my painting, certainly," he replied, "though in early years it
tormented me more than enough. Now I paint by a set of unwritten but
clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically
as you could teach arithmetic; indeed, quite recently I sat all day for
that very purpose with Shields, who is not so great a colourist as he is
a draughtsman: he is a great draughtsman--none better now living, unless
it is Leighton or Sir Noel Paton."

"Still," I said, "there's usually a good deal in a picture of yours
beside what you can do by rule."

"Fundamental conception, no doubt, but beyond that not much. In
painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of
the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not
mechanical is often trivial enough. I don't wonder, now," he added, with
a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, "if you imagine that one comes down
here in a fine frenzy every morning to daub canvas?"

"I certainly imagine," I replied, "that a superior carpenter would find
it hard to paint another _Dante's Dream_, which some people consider the
best example yet seen of the English school."

"That is friendly nonsense," rejoined my frank host, "there is now no
English school whatever."

"Well," I said, "if you deny the name to others who lay more claim to
it, will you not at least allow it to the three or four painters who
started with you in life?"

"Not at all, unless it is to Brown, and he's more French than English;
Hunt and Jones have no more claim to the name than I have. As for all
the prattle about pre-Raphaelitism, I confess to you I am weary of it,
and long have been. Why should we go on talking about the visionary
vanities of half-a-dozen boys? We've all grown out of them, I hope, by
now."

I remarked that the pre-Raphaelite movement was no doubt a serious one
at the beginning.

"What you call the movement was serious enough, but the banding together
under that title was all a joke. We had at that time a phenomenal
antipathy to the Academy, and in sheer love of being outlawed signed our
pictures with the well-known initials." I have preserved the substance
of what Rossetti said on this point, and, as far as possible, the actual
words have been given. On many subsequent occasions he expressed himself
in the same way: assuredly with as much seeming depreciation of the
painte