In addition to the foregoing there must be chronicled under 1855 the first of the important and beautiful designs for woodcuts, which in the absence of his pictures were almost the only means afforded to the public for many years of judging of Rossetti's work. This is a drawing for a poem in William Allingham's "Day and Night Songs," called _The Maids of Elfen-Mere_. Allingham was employed in the Customs in Ireland, and at the period in question, and for some years after, Rossetti and he were very intimate, corresponding freely and vivaciously on all topics concerning their circle. In 1856 were completed the water-colours of _Dante's Dream_ and _Fra Pace_. Mr. William Morris, who acquired several early water-colours by Rossetti, was apparently the first purchaser of _Fra Pace_. The picture represents a kneeling monk busy illuminating at a desk. He has worked so long that the cat has coiled itself up asleep upon his trailing robe. A youthful acolyte is tickling it with a straw in order to beguile the tedium of the long silence. The drawing is somewhat archaic in character and stiff in design, but it is eminently characteristic of Rossetti, full of quaint conceits and humour, from the row of little bottles that hold the good man's pigments to the dead mouse he is copying and the split pomegranate that lies uneaten by his side. The _Dante's Dream_ above mentioned is the first, and in certain points most beautiful, version of the subject which afterwards served for Rossetti's largest picture, the one in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. The water-colour is somewhat squarer in shape, but the composition and pose of the five figures are very much the same as in the large Liverpool picture. In March, 1856, Rossetti secured an important commission--judged by the standard of his current work and prices--to paint a reredos in three compartments for the cathedral of Llandaff, which John P. Seddon was engaged in restoring. The subject he chose for this undertaking was _The Seed of David_, showing in the centre-piece the infant Christ on his mother's knee being adored by a shepherd and a king, and on either side a single figure of David, first as a shepherd-boy slinging the stone for Goliath, and secondly as a king harping to the glory of God. The triptych was not completely finished until 1864, and after that was considerably retouched in 1869, when Rossetti went down to Llandaff for the purpose. The year 1856 (or, if we take the date of publication, 1857) deserves commemoration as the year of the famous Moxon "Tennyson," for which Rossetti designed no fewer than five illustrations. Separate pen-and-ink drawings exist for most, if not for all, of these Tennyson designs, and water-colours were afterwards painted from three of them.