he would have been to tout for attention if his efforts had been ignored. There was no waning of his powers as his career drew towards its close. It was not his fate to be compelled by failing vitality to be content with achievements that lacked the force and freshness by which the work of his vigorous maturity was distinguished, for he died before advancing years had begun in any way to dull his faculties. Only a few weeks after the opening of the 1898 exhibition at the New Gallery he was seized with a sudden illness, which had a fatal termination on the morning of June 17. Really robust health he had never enjoyed, and on several occasions serious breakdowns had hampered his activity; but his devotion to his art was so sincere, and his determination so strong, that these interruptions did not perceptibly affect the continuity of his work. Towards the end of his life, however, he suffered from an affection of the heart, and the demands which he made upon his strength helped, no doubt, to exhaust his vitality. At the time of his death he was striving to complete one of the most important and ambitious pictures he ever planned--"Arthur in Avalon," a vast canvas which, even in its unfinished condition, must be reckoned as an amazing performance, and worthy of a distinguished place in the record of modern art. One of the most interesting things in the life-story of Edward Burne-Jones is the manner of his advance, within some twenty years only, from a position of obscurity to one of exceptional authority in the British school. The young student, who in 1855 had just discovered his vocation and was beginning to feel his way under the guidance of Rossetti, had become in 1877 one of the most discussed of British artists, and had with dramatic suddenness entered into the company of the greatest of the nineteenth-century painters. With no effort on his part to attract attention, without having recourse to any of those devices by which in the ordinary way popularity is won, he secured, practically at the first time of asking, all that other men have had to strive for laboriously through a long period of probation. Although the few things he exhibited while he was a member of the Royal Water Colour Society were sufficient to rouse in the few real judges a deep interest in his future achievement, it was the singular merit of his contributions to the first exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery that made him instantly famous. The wider public realised then, and realised most forcibly, that he was an artist to be reckoned with, and that his work, whether people liked it or not, could by no means be ignored. [Illustration: PLATE VIII.--THE ENCHANTMENTS OF NIMUE (South Kensington Museum)