It was, perhaps, difficult, even for those to whom such work made a sympathetic appeal, to realise what a broad and liberal outlook in Literature, as well as in Art, belonged to the painter whose deliberate selection of a chosen type of beauty might plausibly seem to argue a narrow intelligence; and it was, indeed, only by close and intimate knowledge of the man himself that one was enabled to escape altogether from this initial prejudice. As a talker he was wholly delightful. There were few subjects in literature upon which those who might have thought to convict him of a narrow intensity of feeling could have dared to challenge him with success. It was natural, perhaps, that, with his preoccupation as a painter, his love should have turned most often and most readily to legend and romance. But in romance his task took a wide range, and it will surprise many, who see how rigorously all suggestion of humour is excluded from his paintings, to learn that his knowledge of Dickens was almost encyclopædic, and his love of him, like that of Mr. Swinburne, without limit of praise. As our friendship advanced it came to be our custom to meet periodically at a little restaurant in Soho, over a quiet dinner which we boasted was to be a mere preliminary to “seeing Life”; but these evenings nearly always ended as they began, in talk over the table--light and laughing to commence, and then drifting finally into deep and earnest discussion of the things we loved the best in Poetry and Art; until, the lights gradually extinguished, we were reminded that the closing hour had come, and that the projected visit to the music-hall, which was to constitute our vision of Life, must needs be postponed until another occasion. And so these meetings went on from time to time, but never without a word of mock indignant protest on his part that he had been cheated of a promised debauch. Once he fired my imagination by telling me that he had made a solitary visit to the Aquarium, where he had seen “The Last Supper” tattooed on a man’s back, and this taste of blood had whetted his appetite for more salient examples of monstrosity which were at that time being exhibited in Barnum’s Show. An appointment made for the purpose I was compelled to abandon by reason of a social engagement with my wife, a circumstance which drew from him a little note of pitying sympathy: “Carr Mio, so you have thrown me over! Well, perhaps you are right; at any rate I am wrong to have trusted. I confess I marvelled at your bravery in so openly defying woman, but knew that you must be justified in some consciousness of strength. But lo! you are even as I, who boasted not. Still, we will have Barnum another night. I _must_ see the fat lady, and _will_.” And then on the facing page he adds a monstrous portrait of that lady herself, a thing of unimagined wealth of flesh, seated on a velvet cushion before the upturned eyes of a crowded theatre.