than we expected it came. A nurse
was engaged. One evening Dr. Westland Marston and his son Philip Bourke
Marston came to spend a few hours with Rossetti, For a while he seemed
much cheered by their bright society, but later on he gave those
manifestations of uneasiness which I had learned to know too well.
Removing restlessly from seat to seat, he ultimately threw himself
upon the sofa in that rather awkward attitude which I have previously
described as characteristic of him in moments of nervous agitation.
Presently he called out that his arm had become paralysed, and, upon
attempting to rise, that his leg also had lost its power. We were
naturally startled, but knowing the force of his imagination in its
influence on his bodily capacity, we tried playfully to banish the idea.
Raising him to his feet, however, we realised that from whatever cause,
he had lost the use of the limbs in question, and in the utmost alarm
we carried him to his bedroom, and hurried away for Mr. Marshall It was
found that he had really undergone a species of paralysis, called, I
think, loss of co-ordinative power. The juncture was a critical one, and
it was at length decided by the able medical adviser just named, that
the time had come when the chloral, which was at the root of all this
mischief, should be decisively, entirely, and instantly cut off. To
compass this end a young medical man, Mr. Henry Maudsley, was brought
into the house as a resident to watch and manage the case in the
intervals of Mr. Marshall's visits. It is not for me to offer a
statement of what was done, and done so ably at this period. I only know
that morphia was at first injected as a substitute for the narcotic the
system had grown to demand; that Rossetti was for many hours delirious
whilst his body was passing through the terrible ordeal of having to
conquer the craving for the former drug, and that three or four mornings
after the experiment had been begun he awoke calm in body, and clear
in mind, and grateful in heart. His delusions and those intermittent
suspicions of his friends which I have before alluded to, were now gone,
as things in the past of which he hardly knew whether in actual fact
they had or had not been. Christmas Day was now nigh at hand, and, still
confined to his room, he begged me to promise to spend that day with
him; "otherwise," he said, "how sad a day it must be for me, for I
cannot fairly ask any other." With a tenderness of sympathy I sh