By the bye, I don’t know whether the subscription for Keats’s old and only surviving sister (Madme de Llanos) has been at all ventilated in Liverpool. It flags sorely. Do you think there would be any chance in your neighbourhood? If so, prospectuses, etc., could be sent. I did not view the prospect of subscriptions as very hopeful, and so conceived the idea of a lecture in the interests of the fund. On this project, Rossetti wrote: I enclose prospectuses as to the Keats subscription. I may say that I did not know the list would accompany them--still less that contributions would be so low generally as to leave me near the head of the list--an unenviable sort of parade.... My own opinion about the lecture question is this. You know best whether such a lecture could be turned to the purposes of your Keats article (now in progress), or rather be so much deduction from the freshness of its resources: and this should be the _absolute_ test of its being done or not done.... I think, if it can be done without impoverishing your materials, the method of getting Lord Houghton to preside and so raising as much from it as possible is doubtless the right one. Of course I view it as far more hopeful than mere distribution of any number of prospectuses.... Even £25 would be a great contribution to the fund. The lecture project was not found feasible, and hence it was abandoned. Meantime the kindness of friends enabled me to add to the list a good number of subscriptions, but feeling scarcely satisfied with any such success as I might be likely to have in that direction, I opened, by the help of a friend, a correspondence with Lord Houghton with a view to inducing him to apply for a pension for the lady. It then transpired that Lord Houghton had already applied to Lord Beaconsfield for a pension for Mme. Llanos, and would doubtless have got it, had not Mr. Buxton Forman applied for a grant from the Royal Bounty, which was easier to give. I told Rossetti of this fact and he said: I am not surprised about Lord H., and feel sure it is a pity he was not left to try Beaconsfield, but I judge the projectors on the other side knew nothing of his intentions. However, _I_ was in no way a projector. In the end Lord Houghton repeated to Mr. Gladstone the application he had made to Lord Beaconsfield, and succeeded.