He had, it seems, as I had learned from the lips of a friend whose devotion to the poet endured till his death, a very high opinion of my judgment as an art critic, and he had conceived the belief, perhaps true at the time, that I thought more highly of the work of Burne-Jones than of his own. And although he himself had often said to me things of Burne-Jones’s genius which no word of mine could out-measure in generous praise, it fretted him, in the supersensitive condition in which suffering and ill-health had consigned him, to be reminded by my presence of a judgment that in his own person he would not have resented. It may, as I have said, have been true then--though I was unaware that I had ever betrayed the feeling to Rossetti--that Burne-Jones stood foremost in my appreciation of the painters of the time. It is certainly not true now in any sense that would consign Rossetti to an inferior place; for I have come to think, in the light of later study of the two men’s work, that, in some undefinable and yet indisputable quality of genius, especially as exemplified in his earlier work not then so well known to me, he stands pre-eminent among those who influenced his generation. As a colourist in that supreme sense in which colour is inspired by the purpose of the design, he had in his earlier period no equal among them all. In later life, under the shadow of suffering and sickness, the tones he employed had lost the first glowing radiance of the dawn. But an artist lives only by his best; and if the best of Rossetti be fairly measured and appraised, it will, I think, be hardly possible to dispute his right and claim to have been the foremost leader in the movement with which his name is associated. CHAPTER VI EDWARD BURNE-JONES My intimacy with Burne-Jones struck deeper and lasted without interruption from those earlier days of the “Ignotus” articles in the _Globe_ to the time of his death in 1898. We were friends for more than twenty-five years, and during the greater part of that period the closest and most affectionate friends. To him also I had written when I thought of enlarging that first crude criticism of his work. I was a stranger to him then, although my elder sister had already made his acquaintance, but his letter in reply to my application is delightful in its considerate tolerance towards the somewhat audacious challenge of a boy to be supplied with the particulars of his early career. Referring to the pictures which I had specially selected for notice he writes: