I will be truly glad to meet you when you come to town. You will recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences; but I’ll read you a ballad or two, and have Brown’s report to back my certainty of liking you.... I would propose that you should dine with me at 8.30 on the Monday of your visit, and spend the evening.... Better come at 5.30 to 6 (if feasible to you), that I may try to show you a picture by daylight... Of course, when I speak of your dining with me, I mean tête- à-tête, and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in my studio, and in my painting coat. I judge this will reach you in time for a note to reach _me_. Telegrams I hate. In hope of the pleasure of a meeting, yours ever. How that “hole-and-cornerest of all existences” struck an ardent admirer of the poet-painter’s genius, and a devoted lover of his personal character, as then revealed to me, I hope to describe in a later section of this book. Meantime I must proceed to cull from the epistolary treasures I possess a number of interesting passages on literary subjects, called forth in the course of an intercourse which, at that stage, had few topics of a private nature to divert it from a channel of impersonal discussion. It is a fact that the letters written to me by Rossetti in the year 1880 deal so largely with literary affairs (chiefly of the past) as to be almost capable of _verbatim_ reproduction, even at the present short interval after his death. If they were to be reproduced, they would be found to cover two hundred pages of the present volume, and to be so easy, fluent, varied, and wholly felicitous as to style, and full of research and reflection as to substance, as probably to earn for the writer a foremost place for epistolary power. Indeed, I am not without hope that this accession of a fresh reputation may result even upon the excerpts I have decided to introduce. CHAPTER IV. It was very natural that our earliest correspondence should deal chiefly with Rossetti’s own works, for those works gave rise to it. He sent me a copy of his translations from early Italian poets (_Dante and his Circle_), and a copy of his story, entitled _Hand and Soul_. In posting the latter, he said: I don’t know if you ever saw a sort of story of mine called _Hand and Soul_. I send you one with this, as printed to go in my poems (though afterwards omitted, being, nevertheless, more poem than story). I printed it since in the _Fortnightly_--and, I believe, abolished one or two extra sentimentalities. You may have seen it there. In case it’s stale, I enclose with this a sonnet which _must_ be new, for I only wrote it the other day.