In his letter to me dated from Kelmscott in November 1873 he writes: “As a painter, and I am ashamed at my age to say it, I have never even approached satisfaction with my own progress until within the last five years. My youth was spent chiefly in planning and designing, and whether I shall still have time to do anything I cannot tell.” As a matter of fact, Rossetti had at that date produced most of the work by which he will be best remembered. As a lad of twenty he had painted “The Girlhood of Mary the Virgin,” followed shortly afterwards by “The Annunciation”; and some of the most beautiful of his drawings, the exquisite portrait of “Miss Siddal,” the “Hamlet and Ophelia,” and the large drawing of “Helen arming Paris,” already stood to his credit. At the time I first knew him he had already painted “The Loving Cup,” “The Beloved,” “Mona [Illustration: _Hollyer_ DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI From the painting by G. F. WATTS, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. _To face page 65._ ] Vanna,” and “Lady Lilith,” and in the earlier part of the period to which these works belonged he had given to the world that exquisite series of watercolour paintings in which “Paolo and Francesca” and “Heart of the Night” stand pre-eminent. It was “The Beloved” and “Mona Vanna” that I particularly remember as forming part of the collection of Mr. Rae, and it was mainly upon these two paintings, and a knowledge of some of the drawings in _Black and White_, that I had founded my first enthusiastic appreciation of the painter’s genius. The common impression of the time, which I indeed partly shared, was that Rossetti’s individuality, however finely it might be endowed with poetic imagination, was not of the most virile order. For this he himself was in a great degree responsible. He had deliberately withdrawn from all public exhibition of his work, and even later, when I became connected with the establishment of the Grosvenor Gallery, he still held fast to his earlier resolution. The man, as I came to know him in the flesh, was therefore something of a surprise to me, and I quickly perceived, as I learned to know him better, that, whatever may have been the source of his reluctance to expose himself to the fire of criticism, it certainly was not due to any lack of masculine strength.