The evening was gone by the time the ballad was ended; and it was arranged that upon my return to London from the house of a friend at the sea-side I should again dine with Rossetti, and sleep the night at Cheyne Walk. I was invited to come early in order to see certain pictures by day-light, and it was then I saw the painter’s most important work,--the _Dantés Dream_, which finally (and before Rossetti was made aware of any steps being taken to that end) I had prevailed with Alderman Samuelson to purchase for the public gallery at Liverpool. At my request, though only after some importunity, Rossetti read again his _White Ship_, and afterwards _Rose Mary_, the latter of which he told me had been written in the country shortly after the appearance of the first volume of poems. He remarked that it had occupied three weeks in the writing, and that the physical prostration ensuing had been more than he would care to go through again. I observed on this head, that though highly finished in every stanza, the ballad had an impetuous rush of emotion, and swift current of diction, suggesting speed in its composition, as contrasted with the laboured deliberation which the sonnets, for example, appeared to denote. I asked if his work usually took much out of him in physical energy. “Not my painting, certainly,” he replied, “though in early years it tormented me more than enough. Now I paint by a set of unwritten but clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically as you could teach arithmetic; indeed, quite recently I sat all day for that very purpose with Shields, who is not so great a colourist as he is a draughtsman: he is a great draughtsman--none better now living, unless it is Leighton or Sir Noel Paton.” “Still,” I said, “there’s usually a good deal in a picture of yours beside what you can do by rule.” “Fundamental conception, no doubt, but beyond that not much. In painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical is often trivial enough. I don’t wonder, now,” he added, with a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, “if you imagine that one comes down here in a fine frenzy every morning to daub canvas?” “I certainly imagine,” I replied, “that a superior carpenter would find it hard to paint another _Dante’s Dream_, which some people consider the best example yet seen of the English school.” “That is friendly nonsense,” rejoined my frank host, “there is now no English school whatever.” “Well,” I said, “if you deny the name to others who lay more claim to it, will you not at least allow it to the three or four painters who started with you in life?”