Again, and in a widely different field of dramatic narrative, does Rossetti bring this passionate sense of retribution into play. His drawing for the never-finished picture, “The Death of Lady Macbeth,” is full of the same half-pitiful and half-triumphant spirit of righteous vengeance, and the same perception of inexorable penalty. The aged and dying woman crouching on her bed has once been comely and of commanding countenance; and in her last hour the remembered beauty of her face, the lingering majesty of her figure, seem to overawe her attendants, one of whom presses a sponge to her head. In that changed face the conflict between remorse and pride, ambition and terror, is still fierce and strong; but she is dying utterly alone: there is no love, no tenderness, in the ministry of those who gather round the murderess. Still more clearly and resolutely is this perception of moral issues sustained by the Pre-Raphaelites when they pass from history and legend to classic mythology, to allegorical type, or to the dramatic presentation of modern life. In the “Awakening Conscience” of Holman Hunt, in the exquisitely pathetic “Psyche” of G.F. Watts, in the “Hesterna Rosa,” “Gate of Memory,” and “Found” of Rossetti, the bitter cost of sin is realized with unfaltering consistency. Rossetti’s long- laboured and yet uncompleted “Found” may be taken as the companion, if not the sequel, to his poem, “Jenny.” It shows us the last humiliation of a ruined girl who is “found”—dying on the streets of London—by the lover of her youth,—a countryman who has driven in with his milk-cart through the chill light of a London dawn. All the pride and struggle of the past is written on her once lovely face, and she shrinks in shame and terror from his touch. “Ah! gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge, Under one mantle sheltered ’neath the hedge In gloaming courtship? And, O God! to-day He only knows he holds her;—but what part Can life now take? She cries in her locked heart,— ‘Leave me—I do not know you—go away!’”[11] It might almost be the same sad girl that stands at “The Gate of Memory,” watching a group of young and innocent maidens at play beside a well. “She leaned herself against the wall And longed for drink to slake her thirst And memory at once.” A more original and striking composition is “Hesterna Rosa”—“Yesterday’s Rose.” All the weird realism of Rossetti’s most mediæval manner pervades this painfully impressive design;—mediæval in spirit, and yet almost Hogarthian in its bold handling of human degradation and debauchery. The motive is taken from “Elena’s Song” in Sir Henry Taylor’s “Philip van Artevelde,” Part II., Act v.: “Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife To heart of neither wife nor maid, ‘Lead we not here a jolly life, Betwixt the shrine and shade?’