Among the notables in Chelsea at that time was old William Bell Scott, poet and painter—not one of the giants in either capacity, but yet a man of some merit, for after all, to have achieved the honour of being a crony of such men as Rossetti and Swinburne—who wrote a sonnet on his death—means something. He was a delightful, kindly old gentleman, who was always welcome in a society the entrance to which was difficult indeed. Rossetti, who had a way of chastening his friends, chaffed him in one of those sets of nonsense verses in which he delighted. There is an old person called Scott Who thinks he can paint and can NOT. Shall I call him a poet? Oh! not if I know it! This curious person called Scott. Rossetti himself lived at Tudor House further east, a remnant, as it is said, of the old house where Catherine Parr was visited by the Lord High Admiral Seymour before their marriage was made public; for some time George Meredith and Swinburne shared the house with him. It is a matter of regret to me that I never knew Rossetti. He was much interested in Japan and in Japanese art, and when I published my “Tales of Old Japan” in 1871 he took a fancy to the book, and it was arranged that I should go and see him with Lord Wharncliffe, who was a friend of his; but for one reason or another the visit never came off, and when I went to live near him chloral had done its work, and his health was no longer such as to enable him to make new acquaintances. Whistler’s excellently told stories of his wild eccentricities were amazing. The tale of the pet bull kept in the little back garden and the alarming vagaries of the beast and its master was inimitable; but funniest of all was that of the five-barred gate. It seems that Rossetti walking in some by-street saw a little model of a five-barred gate fixed in the window of a humble dwelling. This for some reason caught his fancy, and he was fired with the desire to have all the windows of his house decorated with miniature five-barred gates. With him to have a wish was to gratify it. In a few days the windows were fitted with their new ornament, and Rossetti was enchanted. Life was now worth living. After a day or two the house began to be besieged by carts bringing baskets of dirty linen. The poet was at his wits’ end and gradually became furious. Was he a laundryman? At last the mystery was revealed. The five-barred gates were in the poorer suburban localities a washerwoman’s sign, meaning, “Washing is taken in here and linen carefully attended to.”