attempts at self-expression than of formal direction along the lines of a recognised school system. Its good effects were shown in the manner of the young man's development and in the rapid growth of his individuality; its bad effects in the persistence of defects of draughtsmanship and brushwork, which were overcome at last by his extraordinary industry and dogged determination to master all the difficulties of his craft.

To his care and advice concerning his pupil's manner of working Rossetti added consideration for his financial position. Burne-Jones, with but slender resources and with little chance as yet of earning the means of support, was having a somewhat hard struggle, which Rossetti did his best to relieve by introducing him to friends who would interest themselves in him, and by helping him to get such work as he was capable of carrying out. One important commission was obtained about the end of 1856, and this commission deserves special mention because it gave Burne-Jones his first experience in a branch of design in which he was destined to become an acknowledged master. Messrs. Powell, the glass-makers, who were making great efforts to improve the quality of stained glass, had applied to Rossetti for a design for a window. He declined to undertake this work, and recommended his pupil instead; and Burne-Jones accordingly prepared a design which was not only accepted by the firm but enthusiastically approved by Ruskin, who was, so Rossetti declared in a letter written at the time, "driven wild with joy" by the merit and quality of the work. This cartoon was followed during the next three or four years by several others drawn for the same firm.

Much that is important in the record of the painter's life is to be assigned to this short period between the beginning of 1857 and the end of 1860. In addition to his designs for stained glass, he produced a large number of pen-and-ink and water-colour drawings, and made his first experiments in oil-painting; and he took part in the decoration of the library of the Oxford Union, an ambitious scheme entered into by Rossetti at the suggestion of Mr. Woodward, the architect of the building, and carried out, despite many unexpected difficulties, by Rossetti himself and a band of enthusiastic young artists. These decorations, which unfortunately fell into a condition of hopeless decay soon after they were completed, took some six months to execute, and he was engaged upon his share of the work until the early part of 1859. In the autumn of that year he paid his first visit to Italy and studied those early Italian masters with whom, as his after work proved, he was so deeply and intelligently in sympathy. This visit, indeed, brought about a marked change in his artistic outlook and helped to lead him away from the Gothic tendencies which he had first shown—probably as a result of his association with Morris—into a far more pronounced inclination for the Italian manner of design. He was married in the summer of 1860 to Miss Georgina Macdonald, about a month after Rossetti's marriage to Miss Siddal; and in taking this step he certainly showed that he had confidence in his professional prospects, a confidence which was justified by the position he had already made for himself.

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The year 1861 must be particularly noted because it marks the commencement of an undertaking with which Burne-Jones was closely associated for the rest of his life. William Morris, who had also left Oxford in 1856 without waiting to take his degree, had gone for rather less than a year into the office of George Edmund Street, the well-known architect, with some idea of adopting that profession; and then, becoming quickly disillusioned, had after some experiments in painting settled down for a while to literary work. In 1859 he married and went to live in a house which had been built for him at Bexley Heath; and it is said that the difficulty he experienced in getting, for the fitting up of this house, things which would please his fastidious taste and gratify his intense love of beauty, induced him to consider whether he could not actively intervene in the much-needed reformation of the decorative arts. At any rate, less than two years after his marriage, he was busy with the details of a scheme which was ambitious enough to satisfy even his love of big things and in which there were endless possibilities.

This scheme took definite form towards the end of 1861, when the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co. was started in Red Lion Square. Burne-Jones, naturally enough, was an active sympathiser with the plans of William Morris, and he showed his sympathy in the most practical manner by putting his talents as a designer at the disposal of the firm. From that time onwards he produced in ever-increasing numbers designs for all kinds of decorative work, stained glass, tapestries, embroideries, book illustration, &c., in which his amazing fertility of imagination and exquisite powers of expression had the fullest scope. The sum total of the work, for which he was responsible during the period of nearly forty years over which his intimate connection with the Morris business extended, was almost incredibly large, and proves convincingly the strenuousness of his lifelong effort.

For it must be remembered that this mass of decorative work did not by any means represent the whole of his achievement, but was, in fact, brought into existence in the intervals of his not less remarkable activity as a picture painter. The number of his finished pictures in different mediums was about two hundred, and his cartoons for stained glass alone make a list of a thousand or more; when to these are added his designs for other purposes, his sketches and studies, and the rough notes by which he gave the first visible shape to the mental images which he proposed to put later on into a completed form, the result arrived at is simply bewildering. Only by the most unremitting industry could he have done so much, and only a man with an abnormally prolific imagination and extraordinary powers of invention could have kept up as he did the high standard of his art.

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