When the end came, and came so swiftly, he left a gap in my life I well knew could never be filled again. I had not seen quite so much of him during the last three or four years of his life, but immediately preceding that period we had been closely associated in a task that lay very near my heart. I had asked him, with Irving’s concurrence, to undertake the designing of the scenery and costumes for my play of _King Arthur_, produced in 1894. At his request I went down to read him the play while he was at work in the garden studio of the Grange, and at its conclusion he announced, to my great delight, that he would willingly undertake the work. The subject was congenial to him; he was deeply versed in all Arthurian lore, and in his paintings he returned again and again to that great cycle of romance enshrined for English readers in the exquisite prose poem of Sir Thomas Malory. We met often and intimately during the progress of preparation, and I remember his almost child-like delight when we mounted to the painting-room at the Lyceum--where Hawes Craven was transferring to a wider canvas his beautiful design for the scene of the Queen’s Maying--as he insisted in taking from the scenic artist a brush of giant dimensions, and executing a passage in one corner of the backcloth so that he might be able to boast, as he laughingly declared to Craven, that he had partly painted the scene himself. [Illustration: OPHELIA From the picture by Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.] CHAPTER VII MILLAIS AND LEIGHTON Millais was not one of those to whom I had written after the publication of my article upon his work, and it was not till later at the Arts Club that I learned to know him personally. Perhaps I refrained from addressing him at the time because I was conscious that my criticism could not be altogether agreeable to him, and I felt that I could hardly demand any assistance in the prosecution of my labours from one whose talent I had so severely handled. Looking back now upon that youthful essay it seems to me, in the light of later knowledge and appreciation, to be disfigured to an extraordinary degree by arrogance of statement and intolerance of judgment. My mind had been so completely captured by the innate poetical feeling that marked the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that I was then scarcely ready to rank at their true value the splendid powers which Millais possessed. I could only think at the time, with something approaching resentment, of Millais’s apparent desertion of the ideal that inspired his earlier efforts, and I was not able to perceive that, in the line of development which he had followed, he was only conforming with absolute loyalty to the natural bent of his genius.