With the year 1854 Rossetti's life entered upon a new phase. This was the first year of his memorable connection with Ruskin. At the same time he had by now engaged himself to marry Miss Siddal, whose companionship and whose health became, for the next eight years, the most absorbing facts in his private life. To speak of Ruskin first, his was no ordinary friendship, but a curious combination of patron, friend, and mentor. If Rossetti had been a common man, living an ordinary life and working on regular lines, such a connection would have been, as he jocularly described it once, "in a way to make his fortune." For Ruskin was willing to buy within certain limits almost everything that Rossetti produced. Furthermore, having taken a great fancy to Miss Siddal, and admiring her poetic and artistic gifts, which had grown in a remarkable way under Rossetti's tuition, he tried to make an arrangement whereby he should purchase all her work also, and there is no doubt that Ruskin's help at this critical period was invaluable, and that without it the young couple would have suffered even more struggling times than they did. For Rossetti was hopelessly unthrifty, flush of money one day, out-at-elbows the next, and invariably anticipating any money to be earned from commissions. The Ruskin letters which have been published, throw an interesting light upon this butterfly existence. Before passing from the subject of Ruskin it is interesting to note that he enlisted Rossetti as an active helper in the scheme promoted by Frederic Denison Maurice for bringing art into the East end. His method of teaching has been described by one who attended his lectures. He began at once with colour. As in his own personality and his own work, light and shade, drawing, and everything else was subservient to colour. Without troubling about the grammar of design he gave his pupils nature to copy and showed them how to copy it. A later generation has come to see wisdom in Rossetti's method, and has introduced it successfully under government auspices in elementary schools. In 1860 Rossetti and Miss Siddal carried out their long projected plans of matrimony, which had been delayed by the latter's illness, by uncertain prospects, and perhaps also by a final want of resolution on Rossetti's part.