At the age of fifteen Rossetti passed from King’s College School to Cary’s Art Academy in Queen Street, Bloomsbury, and thence to the Antique School of the Royal Academy; there to pursue the artistic training to which a strong inclination and evident talent had long called him. Rossetti, however, was a very wayward pupil, and extremely irregular in his attendance. A fellow-student with him at that time, Mr. J.A. Vinter, well recalls one morning when the truant was taken to task for his absence on the previous day. “Why,” said Mr. Cary, “were you not here yesterday?” Rossetti answered coolly, “I had a fit of idleness.” But when the master’s back was turned, an interesting explanation of the avowed idleness was soon forthcoming. Rossetti pulled from his pocket a bundle of manuscript sonnets, which he proceeded, with impartial generosity, to paste inside all his friends’ hats! Fortunately for the subsequent peace of the hyper-sensitive and fastidious author, none of these early effusions seem to have been preserved. Mr. Vinter’s impression of Rossetti was—like that of many who knew him in youth—that beneath a certain brusquerie and unapproachableness of bearing there lay an unbounded warmth of affection and a ready generosity and kindliness of heart. But his delight in practical jokes, his high spirits and his boisterous hilarity in the classroom sometimes put Mr. Cary (the son, by the way, of the eminent translator of Dante) to considerable embarrassment. There was one song in particular which Rossetti was never tired of singing; and he sang it with all the vigour of his strong young voice, almost to the nauseation of his classmates,—in praise of a certain “Alice Gray.” One morning Mr. Cary, entering the room, besought him to abate his tune awhile, for a clergyman had called with his son to see the school, with a view to enrolling the lad as a pupil. Rossetti lowered his voice, but only for a moment. When the visitors appeared on the threshold, his thrilling notes were heard again in passionate protestation of his willingness to die for “Alice Gray.” The school was visited on Saturdays by Mr. Redgrave, R.A., who speedily observed Rossetti’s favourite amusement of drawing grotesque caricatures of antique figures round the margin of his board, and protested that “such liberties were hardly consistent with the dignity of the antique.” Rossetti’s outlining is said to have been very beautiful in effect, though produced in a highly unconventional manner. Mr. Cary forbade charcoal outlines altogether, but Rossetti, who obeyed no rules, invariably made a thick, solid charcoal line which he gradually pared away on either side with pellets of bread till he had reduced it to the desired minimum. It is noticeable that one at least of Rossetti’s friends of this period, and intimately associated with him in the movement which he subsequently led, has always retained the hardness of outline which Rossetti afterwards outgrew.