training and the hope of finding a royal road to painting; great, therefore, was his disappointment when his new instructor set him to paint pickle-jars. The lesson was no doubt salutary, although, as his brother says, he never to the end of his life could be brought to care much whether his pictures were in perspective or not. More important was his introduction through the school of the Royal Academy to a circle of young men inspired by new ideas in art, by a resolve to abandon the conventionalities inherited from the eighteenth century, and to revive the detailed elaboration and mystical interpretation of nature that characterised early mediæval art. Goethe and Scott had already done much to impregnate modern literature with mediæval sentiment. A renaissance of the like feeling was visible in the pictorial art of Germany. But what in Germany was pure imitation became in England re-creation, partly because the English artists were men of higher powers. Little, however, would have resulted but for the fortune which brought Rossetti, Madox Brown, Woolner, Holman Hunt, and Millais together. The atmosphere of enthusiasm thus engendered raised all to greater heights than any could have attained by himself. By 1849 the student of pickle-jars had painted and exhibited at the free exhibition, Hyde Park Corner, a picture of high merit, ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’ which sold for 80l. One inevitable drawback was a spirit of cliquishness; another, which might have been avoided, was the assumption of the unlucky badge of ‘pre-Raphaelite,’ indicative of a feeling which, though Rossetti shared in early years to a marked degree, he very soon abandoned. No one could have less sympathy with the ugly, the formal, or the merely edifying in art, and his reproduction of nature was never microscopic. The virtues and failings of the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ school were well displayed in the short-lived periodical ‘The Germ,’ four numbers of which appeared at the beginning of 1850, under the editorship of Rossetti's brother William Michael, and to which he himself contributed ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and the only imaginative work in prose he completed, the delicate and spiritual story ‘Hand and Soul.’
In November 1852 Rossetti, who had at first shared a studio with Holman Hunt in Cleveland Street, and afterwards had one of his own in Newman Street, took the rooms at 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, which he continued to occupy until his wife's death. The street is now pulled down. From 1849 to his father's death in 1854 his history is one of steady progress in art and poetry, varied only by the attacks, now incomprehensible in their virulence, made by the press upon the pre-Raphaelite artists, and by a short trip to Paris and Belgium, which produced nothing but some extremely vivid descriptive verse. It is astonishing that he should never have cared to visit Italy, but so it was. The years were years of struggle; the hostile criticisms made his pictures difficult to sell, although ‘The Annunciation’ was among them. He eschewed the Royal Academy, and did not even seek publicity for his poems, albeit they included such masterpieces as ‘Sister Helen,’ ‘Staff and Scrip,’ and ‘The Burden of Nineveh.’ These alone proved that Rossetti had risen into a region of imagination where he had no compeer among the poets of his day. Rossetti did not want for an Egeria; he had fallen in love with Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, daughter of a Sheffield cutler and herself a milliner's assistant, a young lady of remarkable personal attractions, who had sat to his friend Walter Deverell as the Viola of ‘Twelfth Night,’ and came to display no common ability both in verse and water-colour painting. Her constitution, unhappily, was consumptive, and delicacy of health and scantiness of means long deferred the consummation of an engagement probably formed about the end of 1851. She sat to him for most of the numerous Beatrices which he produced about this time. A beautiful portrait of her, from a picture by herself, is reproduced in the ‘Letters and Memoirs’ edited by his brother.
Rossetti's partial deliverance from his embarrassments was owing to the munificence of a man as richly endowed with genius as he himself, and much more richly provided with the gifts of fortune. In spite of some prevalent misconceptions, it may be confidently affirmed that Mr. Ruskin had nothing whatever to do with initiating the pre-Raphaelite movement, and that even his subsequent influence upon its representatives was slight. It was impossible, however, that he should not deeply sympathise with their work, which he generously defended in the ‘Times;’ and the personal acquaintance which he could not well avoid making with Rossetti soon led to an arrangement by which Ruskin agreed to take, up to a certain maximum of expenditure, whatever work of Rossetti's pleased him, at the same prices as Rossetti would have asked from an ordinary customer. The comfort and certainty of such an arrangement were invaluable to Rossetti, whose constant altercations with other patrons and with dealers bring out the least attractive side of his
