confess myself scarcely
able to convey more than a suggestion of; as Mr. Watts has said in _The
Athenaeum_, his talk showed an incisiveness so perfect that it had often
the pleasurable surprise of wit. Rossetti had both wit and humour, but
these, during the time that I knew him, were only occasionally present
in his conversation, while the incisiveness was always conspicuous.
A certain quiet play of sportive fancy, developing at intervals into
banter, was sometimes observable in his talk with the younger and more
familiar of his acquaintances, but for the most part his conversation
was serious, and, during the time I knew him, often sad. I speedily
observed that he was not of the number of those who lead or sustain
conversation. He required to be constantly interrogated, but as a
negative talker, if I may so describe him, he was by much the best I had
heard. Catching one's drift before one had revealed it, and anticipating
one's objections, he would go on from point to point, almost removing
the necessity for more than occasional words. Nevertheless, as I say, he
was not, in the conversations I have heard, a leading conversationalist;
his talk was never more than talk, and in saying that it was uniformly
sustained yet never declamatory, I think I convey an idea both of its
merits and limitations.

I understood that Rossetti had never at any period of his life been an
early riser, and at the time of the interview in question he was more
than ever before prone to reverse the natural order of waking and
sleeping hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only
the necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by
which it was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon.
Alluding to this idiosyncrasy, he said: "I lie as long, or say as late,
as Dr. Johnson used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it
for yourself, at what hour I rise." He sat up until four A.M. on this
night of my second visit,--no unaccustomed thing, as I afterwards
learned. I must not omit the mention of one feature of the conversation,
revealing to me a new side of his character, or, more properly, a new
phase of his mind, which gave me subsequently an infinity of anxiety and
distress. Branching off at a late hour from some entirely foreign topic,
he begged me to tell him the facts of some unlucky debate in which I
had long before been engaged on a public platform with some one who had
attacked him. He