To some critics it has been a source of regret that Rossetti should have come in youth so unreservedly under the spell of a type of beauty as exclusive as that of this well-beloved model. The rare blending of spiritual with sensuous charm which she presented in feature and expression so fully satisfied his own ideal of that harmony as to make him dwell upon, and perhaps specialize it, in a way which constituted a danger to his art; inducing him to read into other feminine types the individual characteristics of the one. Fortunate as he was in after life in obtaining for his models some of the most beautiful and cultured women in the artistic and literary circles of London, his tendency was almost always to look at them, as it were, in the light of that established ideal, and to conceive them as versions merely of that elemental loveliness which so dominated his thought. But it was inevitable that a temperament like Rossetti’s should specialize, through their very intensity, the dominant characteristics most familiar to his pencil and his brush. The case of Miss Herbert, an accomplished actress who gave him a number of sittings in the next decade, is perhaps the most striking exception to the rule; but her style of beauty was in too complete a contrast to that of Miss Siddal (being of a severe, robust, and Hellenic type) to allow of any compromise between the features of the two. The combined influence of Browning and Tennyson among contemporary poets, and the increasing sway of Dante over the young painter, inclining him the more strongly in the direction of historic romance, produced, as we have seen, a somewhat desultory course of pen-and-ink sketches and water-colour studies during the next few years. The interval from 1850 to 1858 may be reckoned as Rossetti’s second period. After the completion of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” he painted no important oil picture until the Llandaff “Triptych” of 1859, and the contemporary “Bocca Baciata,” which stands first in point of time, and high in point of merit, among the masterpieces of his maturity.