Before the first number of the "Germ" had appeared, and while it was in progress, Rossetti, accompanied by Holman Hunt, paid a short and hurried visit to Paris and Belgium. A rhyming diary and a series of jocular sonnets, interspersed with a few serious ones, recall the vigour of his first impressions. A large proportion of the time was spent at the Louvre and other galleries, rushing through Old Masters at a furious rate. After their return home Rossetti found his affairs in a bad way. The failure of the _Ecce Ancilla_ to find a purchaser at once (it was not sold until June 1853), and the storm of unfavourable comment it provoked, caused him frankly to abandon as unprofitable the mine of semi-religious, semi-mystical feeling which he had begun to work, and it was some time before he could settle down to find another. Feeling his way pictorially towards the field of romance in which his thoughts wandered, he began to undertake subjects from this class of literature, from Browning, Dante, Keats, and later from the "Morte Darthur" of Malory. His first experiment was a large canvas illustrating the page's song in "Pippa Passes," which soon became impossible and had to be dropped. The composition of it remains, however, in a little painting called _Hist, said Kate the Queen_, dated 1851. Two other designs from Browning which were carried out at this time are a pen-and-ink drawing from "Sordello" entitled _Taurello's first sight of Fortune_ and _The Laboratory_. The latter was, in all probability, Rossetti's first attempt at water-colour (it is painted over a pen-and-ink drawing, as several of his early ones were), and bears but slight resemblance either in thought or execution to the work by which he is popularly known. In addition to these three subjects, Rossetti drew or painted in the years 1849-50 other themes of a romantic and mediaeval nature. Amongst them was his first illustration to Shakespeare, a scene from "Much Ado about Nothing," representing the happy lovers, _Benedick and Beatrice_, receiving the felicitations of those who had plotted their match. From the "Vita Nuova" Rossetti took the incident of _Dante drawing an Angel on the Anniversary of Beatrice's Death_, executed first in pen-and-ink, and originally given to Millais. A water-colour of the same subject is of later date, 1853. The latter was bought by Mr. Thomas Combe, of the Oxford University Press, and was bequeathed by his widow to the Taylorian Museum, where it remains.