in hunting it up he
rummaged the brokers' shops round London for miles, buying for trifles
what would eventually (when the fashion he started grew to be general)
have fetched large sums. Cabinets of all conceivable superannuated
designs--so old in material or pattern that no one else would look at
them--were unearthed in obscure corners, bolstered up by a joiner,
and consigned to their places in the new residence. Following old oak,
Japanese furniture became Rossetti's quest, and following this came blue
china ware (of which he had perhaps the first fine collection made),
and then ecclesiastical and other brasses, incense-burners, sacramental
cups, crucifixes, Indian spice boxes, mediaeval lamps, antique bronzes,
and the like. In a few years he had filled his house with so much
curious and beautiful furniture that there grew up a widespread desire
to imitate his methods; and very soon artists, authors, and men of
fortune having no other occupation, were found rummaging, as he had
rummaged, for the neglected articles of the centuries gone by. What he
did was done, as he used to say, less from love of the things hunted
for, than from love of the pursuit, which, from its difficulty, gave
rise to a pleasurable excitement. Thus did he grieve down his loss, and
little did they think who afterwards followed the fashion he set them,
and carried his passion for antique furniture to an excess at which he
must have laughed, that his' primary impulse was so far from a desire to
"live up to his blue ware," that it was more like an effort to live down
to it.

It was during the earlier years of his residence at Chelsea that
Rossetti formed a habit of life which clung to him almost to the last,
and did more than aught else to blight his happiness. What his intimate
friend has lately characterised in _The Daily News_ as that great curse
of the literary and artistic temperament, insomnia, had been hanging
about him since the death of his wife, and was becoming each year more
and more alarming. He had tried opiates, but in sparing quantities, for
had he not the most serious cause to eschew them? Towards 1868 he heard
of the then newly found drug chloral, which was accredited with all the
virtues and none of the vices of other known narcotics. Here then was
the thing he wanted; this was the blessed discovery that was to save
him from days of weariness and nights of misery and tears. Eagerly he
procured it, took it nightly in single small