The house was shared for some time with three brother-poets,—Swinburne, George Meredith, and W.M. Rossetti. The last-named was for a considerable period a constant inmate; the others, less domesticated, and of strong peculiarities (as is the way of genius) of habit and of taste, presently departed, and their places knew them only as visitors to the brilliant haunt of many other literary celebrities of the day. It has been observed that the most intimate friends of Rossetti’s later years were drawn from the ranks of literature rather than art,—a circumstance which need not, however, be too closely paralleled with his own frequent and increasingly successful reversions to the poetic field. It must be remembered that the Pre-Raphaelite movement presents a combination of the highest poetry with the highest pictorial and decorative art incomparable with anything since the days of Michaelangelo. It was natural that the poetic wing of Pre-Raphaelitism, so to speak, should attach itself more and more firmly to the great group of independent and specialistic poets of the age, of whom no counterparts in original genius are to be found outside Pre-Raphaelitism in modern English art. As early as 1855 we find Rossetti well acquainted with Tennyson and in close friendship with Browning and Mrs. Browning; afterwards with William Morris, several of whose poems were inspired by Rossetti’s pictures; whose first volume, “The Defense of Guenevere,” was dedicated “To my Friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter,” in 1858; and whom Rossetti pronounced to be “the greatest literary identity of our time;” then with Swinburne, whom he placed “highest in inexhaustible splendour of execution,” and whose first-fruits in the tragic drama, “The Queen Mother,” in 1860, were similarly inscribed; and later still with Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet; with George Meredith, Edmund Gosse, John Payne, and many others of the choicest if not the most popular qualities of song. From among the earliest of those memorable friendships there is preserved to us a fascinating record of one autumn evening, typical of many more, when the Rossettis and the Brownings assembled together to listen to Tennyson as he read from manuscript his latest poem;—it is the now familiar pen-and-ink sketch of “Tennyson Reading Maud;” one of those marvellously vigorous and convincing thumb- nail drawings which it was Rossetti’s wont to evolve, in his inimitable method, from the initial focus of a single blot.