Twice during these years of the gradual maturing of his technical power in oils did Rossetti make excursions into a distinctive branch of decorative art, the practice of designing for stained-glass. As early as 1860, William Morris, Burne-Jones, and a few others interested in this much-neglected craft established a firm which was known for some time under the name of Morris and Co., and for which in 1861 Rossetti executed a series of seven effective cartoons for church windows illustrating the “Parable of the Vineyard,” or the “Wicked Husbandmen.” Both designs are of extraordinary vigour and dramatic intensity; strongly mediæval in directness and simplicity, but with a large coherence and fulness of conception, and a harmonious richness of workmanship breathing a more modern spirit into the ancient tale. The dignity and earnestness of the drawing places it on a level with the best work of his purely romantic period, but its technical finish shows the more perfect balance between conception and execution which he was rapidly attaining in his maturity. The designs are now to be seen in the church of St. Martin on the Hill, Scarborough. A similar work was undertaken by Rossetti six years later, when it was proposed to dedicate a memorial window to his aunt, Miss Margaret Polidori, in Christchurch, Albany Street, Regent’s Park, where she had long been a regular attendant until her death in 1867. Rossetti chose for his subject “The Sermon on the Plain.” This design also was executed in stained-glass by the firm of Morris and Co., and placed in the church in 1869. By this time Rossetti’s commissions for pictures had happily become so numerous as to justify his seeking competent assistance in his studio. His friend Mr. Knewstub, at first a pupil, filled for some time the office of assistant. Then Mr. Henry Treffry Dunn was engaged in 1867, and remained with Rossetti almost up to the date of his death. It seems to have been in the years 1867–68 that his health, never fully re- established after the physical and mental prostration of 1862, began to give way beneath that most terrible and relentless of nervous maladies, the special curse of the artistic temperament—insomnia. To that slow and baffling torment, by which Nature sometimes seems to be avenging herself in a sort of frenzied jealousy upon her own handiwork, Rossetti’s highly wrought sensibilities and overwhelming imagination made him the more easy prey. His whole being was constitutionally endowed with that fatal faculty of visualizing the invisible, of suffering more acutely under imagined than under realized pains (though both were laid upon him) which, like an all-consuming fire, burns itself out only with the life that feeds it. Of such sleepless nights as thus become the terror of their victims, haunted with all memories and all fears, Rossetti has left us many a painfully vivid word-picture in his poetry; supremely, perhaps, in that most tragic sonnet, “Sleepless Dreams”—