remained during a long apprenticeship an obstacle rather than an aid to impassioned expression, and from his apprenticeship he never emerged into anything approaching freedom. Upon the vivacity of the imagination in them, and not upon subtlety of line or of observation, the claims of Rossetti's drawings rest, though it is wonderful how often he lifts his art up to the level of all that he has to say and imposes upon us a forgetfulness of its shortcomings. His studies do not reveal a master who looked upon objects and beautiful forms for their own sake and for the sake of the tender drawing he could find in them. Rossetti, indeed, loved a visible world, and liked to interpret the beauty of natural objects, but he was always in haste to get the scene set where such objects were, after all, for him only as accessories to the thing enacted, or as notes in an orchestration; of value but not existing by themselves. He gave to every object the import of the drama in his mind; in his art things seem to have about them the meaning lent them by an imagination that spiritualised objective things so that they seem there in essence only and rendered with a sympathy that shows how alive to the significance of outward beauty Rossetti was, and how his own time and every-day surroundings were fused and blent with his most far-reaching imaginings. To turn to outward things, and to study them as merely offering various surfaces to the light, holding depths of shadow, possessing lines of delicate shape, was, however, impossible to his temperament. The characteristic story of Madox Brown setting in early days the young Rossetti down to paint such still life as jam jars, and of the young painter's impatience, shows that to paint or draw the objects for their own sake only was not congenial to him. There was very likely sufficient of the true painter in Rossetti to make such study a delight, had his mind ever been still enough for his hand to playfully carry out such problems; but always at the back of his mind, at the back of the world for him, a strange drama of love and beauty went on. How then could time be spent in studying what, after all, were merely objects, how could time be spent in deliberating over the study of them? And so the drawings which Rossetti left us are seldom studies of poses and draperies, such elaborate scaffolding as that upon which the art of Burne-Jones was built. They are little pictures in most cases, in which the pencil or the pen afforded a readier and less laboured means of realising quickly the life dramatic of imagination.

Illustration essentially suited his genius in so far as in small dimensions it was easier to reflect easily, whilst the power of creation lasted, what was moving in a mind that was held by no one mood for long. It suited his genius also because it minimised the labour of creation, and with Rossetti it was always apparent that creation was a labour. He himself has said in that other art in which perhaps he always found his happiest expression—

A body that grew faint under the strain of over-feverish genius undoubtedly imposed its indolence upon Rossetti's spirit, so that he shirked the difficulties of his earlier subjects until the downfall of his art set in with the constant production, for indiscriminating purchasers, of a face that grew more and more distant from the beautiful type of his earlier inspiration, which till the end he always pathetically imagined himself to be creating.

Turning to the illustrations, that called A Drawing for a Ballad with its free and loose handling, its qualities of selection and emphasis, show how great in many ways Rossetti was. What lines could be simpler than those in the girl's dress? In such a sketch as this, in the little things, Rossetti is masterly, and one cannot here separate what he has to say from the saying of it. This sketch shows an artist great enough to be unpretentious, and it shows that the happy qualities of mind, united with its craft, sprang from his habits of thought. We see in it with what natural tenderness he has sketched, how by one of the girl's hands her companion's face is lifted to the kiss. This naturalness holds the secret of Rossetti's power. His art was consciously set on decoration, but this is not a decoration; in all that he has read into the miniature faces and in the embracing of the hands, we get in this sketch more intimately than anywhere else evidence of his great heart. This dramatic sympathy would attract every one could it shine more often through the carelessness, the unhappiness, that at the end obscured it. In this way we must think of Rossetti as a failure, and a great man cannot fail once without blinding the world to his many successes. Had Rossetti possessed no sense of colour, and had he not completed many large pictures and elaborate illustrations, but only followed this one path as far as he could go, doing only such things as this, without being a poet and without being a painter, who knows to what extent we should have praised him for these slighter things alone? There is no doubt that we expect so much from him, and he has given us so much in other ways, that we forget the treasures hidden here. One could wish that he had always worked in his drawings with the freedom indicated in this sketch, but it was not the fashion then. Work in Rossetti's day had to come into the market elaborated to the point of its soul's extinction in order to be taken seriously. Now that we have taught ourselves always to value first any indication of the spirit, what would we not give to possess ourselves of work by this artist in impulsive drawings, and it must have been within Rossetti's power to do them down to the last.

The drawing of the death of Lady Macbeth is one of the most wonderful things Rossetti ever did, and it is characteristically marred by imperfect drawing. The drawing is of great quality throughout, except for the figure with head averted. Some wonder why the ability to make the rest of the picture perfect failed the artist here. It is probably because the action of each figure is controlled only by the imaginative impulse that sways the whole composition, that gives to every part of it dramatic intensity as if executed all in one mood, bringing in one moment of creation the whole to life on paper. Those in sympathy with the nature of Rossetti's art do not count this piece of bad drawing a disastrous flaw. The rarity of genius makes them accept everything gratefully; it disarms a cavilling attitude. The fault in their eyes even seems to add to the tense note struck as a changed note in an over sweet harmony. Its dissonance breaks the monotonous rhythmic decoration, and its harshness relieves the detail so delicately wrought. Rossetti is of the extreme few who have finished minutely without sacrificing the qualities of greater significance than finish. His art is great enough to make us forget the detail and to render us for the time oblivious of it. In our absorption in the subject it seems for a time not to exist, only the tense mood exists, the intense moment. In a picture in which the moments are aflame with tragedy Rossetti drew