Till the age of twenty-four he remained in Liverpool, earning his living in a builder's office, lecturing, starting societies, working as secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and writing for the papers. His lectures on Shakespeare attracted the attention of Lord Houghton, who expressed a desire to meet him. A meeting was arranged at the house of Henry Bright (the H.A.B, of Hawthorne); and the first thing that Lord Houghton, the biographer of Keats, said when Hall Caine came into the room was: "You have the head of Keats." He predicted that the young author would become a great critic. Another of Hall Caine's lectures, delivered during this period, "The Supernatural in Poetry," brought a long letter of eulogy from Matthew Arnold. His lecture on Rossetti won him the friendship of this great man, a correspondence ensued, and when Caine was twenty-five years old, Rossetti wrote and asked him to come up to London to see him. Caine went and was received most cordially. [Illustration: BISHOP'S COURT, WHERE DAN MYLREA IN "THE DREMSTER" WAS REARED.] [Illustration: SIR W.L. DRINKWATER, THE PRESENT FIRST DREMSTER OF THE ISLE OF MAN. From a photograph by J. E. Bruton, Douglas, Isle of Man.] "He met me on the threshold of his house," he relates, "with both hands outstretched, and drew me into his studio. That night he read me 'The King's Tragedy.'" During the evening Rossetti asked him to remove to London and invited him to his house; at the same time--it may be to prepare him for their common life--he showed him, to Caine's horror, what a slave he had become to the chloral habit.