He had, as he maintained the architect should always in truth have, a right judgement in all things, interior decoration as well as structure, secular and domestic detail as well as ecclesiastic. When he had thought of giving up the house in Cavendish Square a friend “told me he never saw so charming a room as this drawing-room and he was rejoicing that I could not leave it just now--nearly every one seems to be of the same mind.... All my happiest associations are with these rooms and I begin to think I should be less happy anywhere else.” [Illustration: GEORGE EDMUND STREET IN 1877] He was to need the happiness of associations. The work begun and carried out by the nest-building instinct, that faculty which shapes after one’s own desire a shelter for one’s own kind and kin, was to prove a solace for grief at the last. His wife had died in 1874; two years later Street married “a lady who had been of all my mother’s friends the most highly prized, and had been so intimate with us as to have been her companion on many of our foreign tours”--her step-son writes. It is typical of the homing breed, of the instinct that holds in the old paths, to rebuild with the least possible of novelty, and recommence without snapping one of the old threads. The blind impulse of solidarity finds its wants in the ancient walks, the ancient intimacies, the ancient affections. Mrs. Street lived only eight weeks after her marriage. Thereafter Street kept men’s company mostly. He had for friends all that was most living in London, the Rossettis and Holman Hunt, George Boyce and J. W. Inchbold, William Bell Scott, Madox Brown, Morris and Burne-Jones. That _enfant terrible_ of the last generation, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, has probably reminiscences of him. He had, before all, his son, who on quitting Oxford came up to work under him; he had his associates in his own profession and in the Royal Academy. In that last year he made a tour with Arthur Street among the German cities, but the drawings that could date it are few, and one of the latest notebooks passes within a few leaves from pulpits in southern Italy to the landscape around S. Gervais. Thither he had gone in the autumn to take the waters: “he was troubled more or less by headache the whole time, but he did a good deal of walking and sketching in spite of very bad weather.” That was in September. The stroke fell on him the middle of November; then he was better, was planning a long journey in Egypt. On December 18 he was dead. The tireless energy never knew a real abatement. He lies in the nave of the Abbey as Pierre de Montéreau lies in S. Germain-des-Prés, and in Rheims Robert de Coucy.