Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal WMR 1 Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal WMR The Burlington Magazine for Connoiseurs, The Savile Publishing Company, Limited, 14, New Burlington Street, W. London 1903 May 1st University of Virginia, Alderman Library n1.b95.v1.n3 Commentary
Introduction

This early essay by WMR is a crucial contemporary document about DGR and his wife.

Textual History: Composition

Textual History: Revision

Production History

Reception History

Iconographic

Printing History

Pictorial

Historical

Literary

Translation

Autobiographical

Bibliographic

T Text appears in two columns on the page. The attribution “Written By W. M. Rossetti,” is flanked by an ornamental leaf on each side. The letter “H” that opens the main body of text is ornamental, with intertwining vines that appear to represent, among other things, a heart. <hi rend="center">DANTE ROSSETTI AND ELIZABETH SIDDAL</hi> <lb/> <hi rend="center">WRITTEN BY W. M. ROSSETTI</hi> <lb/> <hi rend="center">WITH FACSIMILES OF FIVE UNPUBLISHED DRAWINGS BY</hi> <lb/> <hi rend="center">DANTE ROSSETTI IN THE COLLECTION OF</hi> <lb/> <hi rend="center">MR. HAROLD HARTLEY</hi>

HAVING been invited to say something about the five designs of Miss Siddal by Rossetti, here reproduced (by kind permission of their present owner, Mr. Harold Hartley), I make this the opportunity for writing a brief monograph of the woman who bore so large a part in the painter's earlier life. I have before now written and edited various details concerning her,and shall have to repeat myself to some extent; but those details did not form a consecutive unity, and I think she is well entitled to something in the nature of express biographic record. Her life was short, and her performances restricted in both quantity and development; but they were far from undeserving of notice, even apart from that relation which she bore to Dante Rossetti, and in a very minor degree to other leaders in the “Præra-phaelite” movement. I need hardly say that I myself knew her and remember her very well. ¶ I may begin by mentioning that the correct spelling of the surname appears to be Siddall: but Dante Rossetti constantly wrote Siddal, and I follow his practice. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal was the daughter of a Sheffield cutler, and was born in or about 1834; as my brother was born in May 1828, she was some six years his junior. The family came to London—New-ington Butts or its neighbourhood; this, I take it, was before the birth of Elizabeth.I do not know when the father died; it must have been prior to the time when Elizabeth was known in any artistic circle.The mother survived, along with three sons and three daughters; one or more of the sons continued the cutlery business. Eliza-beth received an ordinary education, con-formable to her condition in life; she be-came an assistant or apprentice in a bonnet shop in Cranbourne Alley, then a very well-known line of shops close to LeicesterSquare. ¶ In Elizabeth Siddal's constitu-tion there was a consumptive taint. This may, I suppose, have come from the father; for the mother was a healthy woman, living on till past ninety. Two sons and two daughters are still alive, or were so very recently. Almost the only anecdote that I have heard of Elizabeth's early life, before she came into my circle, is that “she had read Tennyson, having first come to know something about him by finding one or two of his poems on a piece of paper which she brought home to her mother, wrapped round a pat of butter.” ¶ Elizabeth was truly a beautiful girl; tall, with a stately throat and fine carriage, pink and white complexion, and massive straight coppery-golden hair. Her large greenish-blue eyes, large-lidded, were peculiarly noticeable. Ineed not, however, here say much about her appearance, as the designs of Dante Rossetti speak for it better than I could do. One could not have seen a woman in whose whole demeanour maidenly and feminine purity was more markedly apparent. She maintained an attitude of reserve, self-con-trolling and alien from approach. Without being prudish, and along with a decidedinclination to order her mode of life ac-cording to her own liking, whether con-formable or not to the views of the British matron, she was certainly distant. Her talk was, in my experience, scanty; slight and scattered, with some amusing turns, and

No.3. Vol.1.—May 1903

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little to seize hold upon—little clue to herreal self or to anything determinate. I never perceived her to have any religion; but a perusal of some of her few poems may fairly lead to the inference that she was not wanting in a devotional habit of feeling. ¶ The Præraphaelite Brotherhood, or P. R. B.,was formed towards September 1848—the principal painter-members being William Holman-Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A leading doctrine with the Præraphaelites (and I think a very sound one) was that it is highly inexpedient for a painter, occupied with an ideal or poetical subject, to portray his personages from the ordinary hired models; and that on the contrary he ought to look out for living people who, by refinement of cha-racter and aspect, may be supposed to have some affinity with those personages—and, when he has found such people to paint from, he ought, with substantial though not slavish fidelity, to represent them as they are. This plan would secure (1) some general conformity between the painter's idea of his personages and the individuals from whom he pictures them; and (2) a lifelike treatment of a living countenance, with its precious personal vitality, and nuances of mould and character—things which it is difficult or impossible to obtain from “inner consciousness,” but which na-ture supplies in lavish superabundance. In other words, the artist had to furnish the conception; nature had to furnish the model; but this must not be a model ob-viously unresembling. ¶ Walter Howell Deverell was a young painter of promising gifts, and a very handsome one: he was not a P.R.B., but was much associated with the members of the Brotherhood, and with none of them more than with Rossetti. He was a son of the secretary to the Govern-ment School of Design at Somerset House,which in the course of years developed in-to the Department of Science and Art. One day, which may have been in the latter part of 1849, he accompanied his mother to a bonnet-shop in Cranbourne Alley. Looking from the shop through an open door into a back room, he saw a very young woman working with the needle: it was Elizabeth Siddal. Deverell was at this time beginning a well-sized picture from Shakespeare's “Twelfth Night”—the scene where the Duke Orsino, along with Viola habited as a page, and the Jester, is listening to some music. Deverell wanted to get a model for Viola, and it struck him that here was a very suitable damsel for his purpose—and, indeed, he could not have chosen better. So he asked his mother to obtain from the shop-mistress permission for her assistant to sit to him. The permission was granted, and the Viola was painted, and is a very fair likeness of Miss Siddal at that early date. Soon afterwards Deverell drew another Viola from her, in an etching for The Germ . Ros-setti sat to his friend for the head of the Jester in the oil picture, and it was probably in the studio of Deverell that he first met his future wife. The picture was exhibited in 1850. It belonged at one time to William Bell Scott, the painter and poet; afterwards to a lady in Wales, who, dying, left it under trusteeship. ¶ Rossetti saw that Deverell had secured a very eligible model for his Viola, and that the same model would suit himself extremely well for a Dante's Bea-trice or something else. She consented to sit to him, and he painted from her a num-ber of times; the first coloured example seems to have been his little water-colour named Rossovestita , 1850. I shall not here dwell upon other instances, but leave this over for a list before I conclude. To fall in love with Elizabeth Siddal was a very easy performance, and Dante Gabriel transacted it at an early date—I suppose before 1850 was far advanced. She sat also to Holman-Hunt and to Millais—not I think to any-one else. Her head appears in Holman-Hunt's pictures of the Christian Missionary <lb/>persecuted by the Druids , 1850, and of Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, 1851; and in Millais's Ophelia , 1852. Of blank page Text appears in two columns on the page. There is a small blot in the quotation from Algernon Swinburne, in the phrase “trying to cast a slur,” between “to” and “cast,” as if from a broken or misaligned piece of type.

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these three versions of her face, the Ophelia is the truest likeness, and is indeed a close one, only that the peculiar poise of the head thwarts the resemblance to some extent. ¶ At what precise date Dante and Elizabeth were definitely engaged I am not able to say: it may probably have been before the end of 1851, and I presume that about the same time she finally gave up any attend-ance in the bonnet-shop. The name Eliza-beth was never on Dante's lips, but Lizzie or Liz; or fully as often Guggums, Guggum, or Gug. Mrs. Hueffer, the younger daughter of Ford Madox Brown, tells an amusing anecdote how, when she was a small child in 1854, she saw Rossetti at his easel in her father's house, uttering momently, in the absence of the beloved one, “Guggum, Guggum.” Lizzie was continually in Ros-setti's studio, 14, Chatham Place, Black-friars, tête-à-tête . Sometimes she was sitting to him, but they were often together with-out any intention or pretence of a sitting; as time advanced she was frequently also drawing or painting there for her own be-hoof. This may have begun some consider-able while before July 1854; but it seems to have been only about that date that Ros-setti thought expressly that she would do well to turn to professional account the gifts for art which, though not cultivated up to the regulated standard, she manifestly pos-sessed and clearly exemplified. After a while “Guggum” became so much of a settled in-stitution in the Chatham Place chambers that other people understood that they were not wanted there in and out—and I may include myself in this category. The reader will understand that this continual association of an engaged couple, while it may have gone beyond the conven-tional fence-line, had nothing in it suspi-cious or ambiguous, or conjectured by any one to be so. They chose to be together because of mutual attachment, and because Dante was constantly drawing from Gug-gum, and she designing under his tuition. He was an unconventional man, and she, if not so originally, became an unconventional woman. As Algernon Swinburne, who knew her well in after years, once said in print, but with a different reference: “It is impossible that even the reptile rancour, the omnivorous malignity, of Iago himself, could have dreamed of trying to cast a slur on the memory of that incomparable lady whose maiden name was Siddal and whose married name was Rossetti.” Dante was also occa-sionally, but I think seldom, in the house where Lizzie lived: “her native crib, which I was glad to find comfortable,” as he termed it, with his usual proclivity towards the slangy in diction. ¶ Nothing, I suppose, was more distant from Miss Siddal's ideas in her earlier girlhood than the notion of drawing or painting; but, under incite-ment from Rossetti, she began towards the close of 1852. The first design of hers which I find mentioned was from Wordsworth's We are Seven, January 1853. In 1853–4 she painted a portrait of herself—the most competent piece of execution that she ever produced, an excellent and graceful likeness, and truly good: it is her very self. This work remains in my possession, and there are few things I should be sorrier to lose. Other early designs are—a pen-and-ink drawing of Pippa and the Women of Loose <lb/>Life , from Browning's drama; a water-colour of the Ladies' Lament, from the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens; two water-colours from Tennyson, St. Agnes' Eve and Lady Clare; a spectral subject, water-colour, The Haunted Tree. All these are in my hands, except the Patrick Spens, which belongs to Mr. Watts-Dunton. There was an idea that she, along with Rossetti, would illustrate a ballad-book compiled by William Allingham. This project lapsed; but she produced (May 1854) a design of Clerk Saunders, which afterwards she de-veloped into a water-colour, about her com-pletest thing except the portrait. It was purchased by the American scholar Pro-fessor Eliot Norton; later on in 1869 Ros-setti got it back, and it is now in the fine T 2 Text appears in two columns on the page.

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collection of Mr. Fairfax Murray. “It evensurprised me,” Rossetti wrote to ProfessorNorton, “by its great merit of feeling andexecution.” By 1854 she had also produced designs of Rossetti's Sister Helen, The Na-tivity, The Lass of Lochroyan, and The <lb/>Gay Gos-hawk—the latter two for the Ballad-book. Two water-colours, La Belle <lb/>Dame Sans Merci, and the old design of We are Seven, were in hand at the begin-ning of 1855. There was also a design, pen-and-ink, of Two Lovers seated al fresco , and singing to the music of two dark Malay-looking women, while a little girl listens. This properly belonged by gift to Alling-ham, but got sold inadvertently to Ruskin. She made some designs to be executed in carving in Trinity College, Dublin, a build-ing carried out by Benjamin Woodward (the architect of the Oxford Museum). One of the designs represented “an angel with some children and all manner of other things,” and it was supposed to be in situ in 1855, but I see it stated that no such work is now traceable there. She began late in 1856 an oil-picture from one of the ballad-subjects, probably The Lass of Lochroyan. This I think is not now extant, but there is a water-colour of it. ¶ The total of designs made by Lizzie, coloured and uncoloured, was somewhat considerable, allowing for the short duration of her artistic activity. I question whether she produced much at a date later than 1857; but she certainly pro-duced something after as well as before her marriage—she was at work at the end of November 1860, and probably later. In January 1862 the drawing-room at 14 Chat-ham Place was entirely hung round with her water-colours of poetic subjects; and there must at that time have been several others in the possession of Ruskin, and not of him alone. This drawing-room was pa-pered from a design made by Rossetti; trees standing the whole height of the wall, con-ventionally treated, with stems and fruit of Venetian red, and leaves black, and with yellow stars within a white ring: “the ef- fect of the whole,” he said, “will be rather sombre, but I think rich also.” As to the quality of her work, it may be admitted at once that she never attained to anything like masterliness-her portrait shows more competence than other productions; and in the present day, when vigorous brush-work and calculated “values” are more thought of than inventiveness or sentiment, her per-formances would secure little beyond a sneer first, a glance afterwards, and a silent pass-ing by. But in those early "Præraphaelite" days, and in the Præraphaelite environment, which was small, and ringed round by hostile forces, things were estimated dif-ferently. The first question which my bro-ther would have put to an aspirant is, “Have you an idea in your head?” This would have been followed by other ques-tions, such as: “Is it an idea which can be expressed in the shape of a design? Can you express it with refinement, and with a sentiment of nature, even if not with searching realism?” He must have put these queries to Miss Siddal practically, if not vivâ voce ; and he found the re-sponse on her part such as to qualify her to begin, with a good prospect of her pro-gressing. She had much facility of inven-tion and composition, with eminent purity of feeling, dignified simplicity, and grace; little mastery of form, whether in the hu-man figure or in drapery and other materials; a right intention in colouring, though neither rich nor deep. Her designs resembled those of Dante Rossetti at the same date: he had his defects, and she had the deficiencies of those defects. He guided her with the ut-most attention, but I doubt whether he ever required her to study drawing with rigorous patience and apply herself to the realizing of realities. It should be added that her health was so constantly shaky, and often so extremely bad, that she was really not well capable of going through the toils of a thorough artist-student. ¶ Ruskin made himself personally known to Rossetti in April 1854, by calling at his studio: he had blank page blank page "Text appears in two columns on the page.

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some little while before seen and praised some of the painter's works. He struck up a close friendship with my brother, and undertook to buy, in a general way, what-ever the latter might have to offer him from time to time: the prices to be paid were not lavish, but they were such as Rossetti, at that stage of his practice and repute, was highly pleased to accept. Through Rossetti, Ruskin knew Miss Siddal before the end of 1854. He took the greatest pleasure in her art-work, present and prospective. She visited at his house, with Rossetti, in April 1855. He “said she was a noble, glorious creature, and his father said that by her look and manner she might have been a countess.”In March of this year John Ruskin (as Ros-setti wrote) “saw and bought on the spot every scrap of design hitherto produced by Miss Siddal. He declared that they were far better than mine, or almost than any-one's, and seemed quite wild with delight at getting them. He is going to have them splendidly mounted, and bound together in gold.” The price which Dante Gabriel named for the lot was certainly modest, £25: Ruskin made it £30. In May of this same year Ruskin settled £150 per annum on Miss Siddal, taking, up to that value, any works which she might produce. This arrange-ment held good, if I am not mistaken, up to 1857, but was then allowed to lapse, with reluctance on the generous writer's part, upon the ground that the state of her health did not admit of her meeting her share in the engagement in a continuous and ade-quate manner. Ruskin called Miss Siddal Ida (from Tennyson's “Princess”), and befriended her to the utmost of his power in various ways—getting her to visit Ox-ford, and place herself under the advice of Dr. Acland who pronounced (and I fancy with a good deal of truth) that the essence of her malady was “mental power long pent up and lately overtaxed.” It is too clear, however, that the germs of consumption were present, with neuralgia, and (accord-ing to one opinion) curvature of the spine. One result of Ruskin's admiration of Miss Siddal's designs was that Tennyson and his wife heard of the matter at the time when the well-known “Illustrated Tenny-son” was in preparation; and they both “wished her exceedingly to join” in the work: “Mrs. Tennyson wrote immediately to Moxon about it, declaring that she had rather pay for Miss Siddal's designs herself than not have them in the book.” Her drawings, reasonably controlled by Rossetti, would really have been a credit to the under-taking; but, whatever the reason, she was not enlisted by Moxon. Perhaps he thought the fastidiousness of Rossetti over his wood-blocks was quite enough without being re-inforced by that of an unknown female ally. ¶ I hardly think that Miss Siddal ever exhibit-ed any of her paintings or drawings, except in the summer of 1857, when a small semi-public collection was got together by various artists in Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. People came to call this “the Præraphael-ite Exhibition,” although no such name was put forward by the exhibiting artists. Miss Siddal sent Clerk Saunders, Sketches <lb/>from Browning and Tennyson, We are Seven, The Haunted Tree, and a Study of a Head (I think her own portrait). Madox Brown, Holman-Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, C. Allston Collins, William Davis, Arthur Hughes, Windus, Joseph Wolf, Boyce, and some others, were contributors. Clerk Saunders was also included in an American Exhibi-tion of British Art, New York, in the same year, 1857. ¶ Rossetti made Miss Siddal known to several friends of his, all of whom treated her with the utmost cordiality or even affection: William and Mary Howitt, and their daughter Anna Mary (then a painter of whom high hopes were enter-tained); Miss Barbara Leigh Smith (Mrs. Bodichon); Miss Bessie Parkes (Madame Belloc); William Allingham; the sculptor, Alexander Munro; Madox Brown and his family. Mrs. Brown, who had previously had some knowledge of Mrs. Siddal, natur-ally became very intimate with Lizzie. At Text appears in two columns on the page.

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a later date there were Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Alexander Gilchrist, and their respective wives. In Paris, in the autumn of 1855, she met for a few minutes Robert Browning: and Rossetti showed him the design from “Pippa Passes,” with which the poet “was delighted beyond measure.” My mother did not meet Lizzie in person until April 1855: between that date and the time when my brother's marriage took place, they encountered from time to time, not fre-quently. Dante Gabriel had at one period a fancy that Christina was not well affected to the unparagoned Guggum: in this there was in fact next to nothing, or indeed nothing. ¶ All this while Miss Siddal's health was extremely delicate—at times wofully bad. One recurring symptom was want of ap-petite and inability to retain food on the stomach. She went to a number of health resorts: Hastings, Bath, Matlock, Cleve-don. The most important expedition was in the autumn of 1855, when she journeyed to Nice, passing through Paris: this last was the place that seemed to suit her the best of all. At Nice in December she had weather “as warm as the best English May,” but the improvement to her health, after a somewhat prolonged sojourn, did not turn out to be considerable. She was accom-panied in this instance by a Mrs. Kincaid, a married lady related to my mother, but of whom we did not know very much; but they had, I think, separated before the experiment at Nice came to a conclusion. Between Ruskin's subvention and funds sup-plied by my brother Miss Siddal was kept while abroad free from money straits: a sum of £80 was in her hands, partly at the date of starting and partly soon afterwards. ¶ Rossetti made a rather long stay with Miss Siddal at Matlock, where she tried the hydropathic cure: this may, I think, have been in the later months of 1857 and the earlier of 1858. It appears to me—but I speak with uncertainty—that during the rest of 1858 and the whole of 1859 he did not see her so constantly as in preceding years. For this, apart from anything savour-ing of neglectfulness on his part, there may have been various causes, dubious for me to estimate at the present distance of time. Her own ill-health would have been partly accountable for such a result; and, again, the fact that Rossetti, increasingly employed as a painter, had by this time some other sitters for his pictures—Miss Burden (Mrs. Morris), Mrs. Crabb (stage name Miss Her-bert), and two whose heads appear respec-tively in the Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee and in Bocca Baciata. In April I 860 Miss Siddal was staying at Hastings, and was desperately ill. She may possibly in some previous instances have been equally brought down: more so she cannot have been, for she seemed now at the very gates of the tomb. Dante Rossetti joined her at this place; and some expres-sions in his letters may be worth quoting (I condense ad libitum ):—¶ To his mother, April 13, 1860: “I write you this word to say that Lizzie and I are going to be married at last, in as few days as possible. Like all the important things I ever meant to do—to fulfil duty or secure happiness—this one has been deferred almost beyond possibility. I have hardly deserved that Lizzie should still consent to it, but she has done so, and I trust I may still have time to prove my thankfulness to her. The constantly failing state of her health is a terrible anxiety in-deed.” To myself, April 17: “You will be grieved to hear that poor dear Lizzie's health has been in such a broken and failing state for the last few days as to render me more miserable than I can possibly say. She gets no nourishment, and what can be reason-ably hoped when this is added to her dread-ful state of health in other respects? If I were to lose her now, I do not know what effect it might have on my mind, added to the responsibility of much work, commis-sioned and already paid for, which still has to be done. The ordinary licence we already have, and I still trust to God we may be enabled to use it. If not, I should have so blank page Text appears in two columns on the page.

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much to grieve for, and (what is worse) so much to reproach myself with, that I do not know how it might end for me.” To Madox Brown, April 22: “I have been, almost without respite, since I saw you, in the most agonizing anxiety about poor dear Lizzie's health. Indeed, it has been that kind of pain which one can never re-member at its full, as she has seemed ready to die daily and more than once a day. Since yesterday there has certainly been a reaction for the better. It makes me feel as if I had been dug out of a vault, so many times lately has it seemed to me that she could never lift her head again.” ¶ Black as things had been looking, Miss Siddal did so far revive as to be able, on May 23, 1860, to attend at St. Clement's Church, Hastings, where the marriage rites were performed by the Rev. T. Nightingale. The bride and bride-groom went off at once to Folkestone, and thence to Boulogne and Paris. At Boulogne she made acquaintance with a married couple advancing in years, Signor C. P. Maenza and his wife, who had been very attentive and affectionate to Dante Gabriel in 1843 and 1844, when he was received into their house to keep his health and stamina up to the mark. Maenza was known to my father, being, like himself, one of the numerous re-fugees from governmental tyranny in Italy : he subsisted in Boulogne chiefly by teaching drawing. He was a rapid and telling sketcher of all sorts of bits of landscape and seascape, with fisher-folk, boats, and so on. I still possess several of his drawings of this class, which, without showing artistic faculty of any exalted order, are cleverly dashed or touched off: I have more than once heard my brother say, and truly say, “I know I couldn't have done them.” Lizzie took a warm liking to this most worthy Italian, and Rossetti made a pencil study of his head, now in the Art Gallery of Cardiff. ¶ Ros-setti and his bride spent most of their honey-moon in Paris: one thing that he did there in part was the design named How They Met Themselves—two medieval lovers in a forest meeting their own wraiths; anotherwas the Dr. Johnson and the Methodistical Young Ladies at the Mitre Tavern. Pretty soon they were back in London, staying on in the chambers at Chatham Place, con-siderably enlarged by opening a communi-cation into the adjoining house, and they also occupied for a while part of a house in Downshire Hill, Hampstead. There is a pleasing anecdote of the day when they re-turned from France to London, showing the impulsive generosity and good-nature which were characteristic of Dante Rossetti, and also evincing that his wife was quite willing to second him when occasion arose. As he was returning, he saw in a newspaper that a friendly chum of his bachelor days—hardly to be called a friend in the fuller sense of the word—was just dead, leaving a widow and two children. This was Robert (or Bob) Brough, a comic writer of some cleverness and acceptance and of limp purse. One of his publications was a series of verses, “Songs <lb/>of the Governing Classes,” with plenty of point and sting in them: he dedicated the booklet to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The bridegroom had, at the moment of re-enter-ing London, no ready cash: it had all been spent in Paris, some of it upon trinkets which Lizzie was wearing. So, as they hired a cab, they drove round to a pawn-broker's, where he pledged the trinkets; they next proceeded to Mrs. Brough's lodg-ings, where he left the proceeds; and only then did they take the route to their own home. I am not sure that I ever heard these details from my brother—he could do a kindly act without saying anything about it: but they have been put into print ere now on authority which seems perfectly safe. ¶ Lizzie did not attain to anything approaching tolerable health during her wedded life, although it may be that illness did not assail her again in quite so fierce a form as had been the case just before her marriage. She continued designing and painting to some extent at intervals, and of course she sat at times to her husband for Text appears in two columns on the page.

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his works. The last instance, only a few days before her death, was for a head of the Princess in the subject called St. George and the Princess Sabra. Ill-health did not induce her to seclude herself beyond what was actually necessary: every now and then she stayed on a visit in the house of the Madox Browns near Highgate Rise, or in that which the Morrises had been building at Upton, near Bexley. In May 1861 she was confined of a stillborn female infant; her recovery was rapid enough. In all cases she was, as her husband wrote, “obstinately plucky in illness.” The then very youthful poet, Algernon Swinburne, just at the very beginning of his shining career, was often in her company: he delighted in her society, and she in his. I have already quoted some words of his, a tribute to her memory: he went on to speak “of all her marvellous charms of mind and person—her matchless grace, loveliness, courage, endurance, wit, humour, heroism, and sweetness.” Mr. Swinburne also once wrote something to me, expressing a wish that it might be pub-lished at some opportunity. I will here only cite one sentence, in which he says that, with a single exception, “I never knew so brilliant and appreciative a woman—so quick to see and so keen to enjoy that rare and delightful fusion of wit, humour, character-painting, and dramatic poetry—poetry subdued to dramatic effect—which is only less wonderful and delightful than the highest works of genius. She was a wonderful as well as a most lovable creaߝture." Mr. Swinburne is very well known to be a munificent praiser: but it would be childish to imagine that, when an intellect such as his discerns certain intellectual and personal merits in another person, nothing of the sort was really there. Lizzie Rossetti has more claims than one to sympathetic and respectful memory: no testimony to them tells out so impressively as the record of her from the hand of Algernon Swinburne. ¶ Of her life there is little more for me to say—only of her death. Her consumptive malady, accompanied by wearing neuralgia, continued its fatal course, and her days could at best, to all appearance, have only been prolonged for some very few years. For the neuralgia she took, under medical authority, frequent doses of laudanum—sometimes as much as 100 drops at a time; she could not sleep nor take food without it;stimulants were also in requisition. On February 10, 1862, she dined at the Sab-loniére Hotel, Leicester Square, with her husband and Mr. Swinburne; it was no uncommon thing for her to go out thus, as a variation from dining at home. The Ros-settis returned to Chatham Place about eight o'clock; she was about to go to bed at nine, when Dante Gabriel went out again. He did not re-enter till half-past eleven, when the room was in darkness, and, calling to his wife, he received no reply. He found her in bed, utterly unconscious; there was a phial on the table by the bed-side—it had contained laudanum, but was now empty. Dr. Hutchinson (who had attended her in her confinement) was called in, and three other medical men, one of them the eminent surgeon John Marshall, well known to Madox Brown and to Ros-setti. The stomach-pump and other reme-dies were tried—all without avail. Lizzie Rossetti expired about a quarter past seven in the morning of February 11. An in-quest was held on the 12th at Bridewell Hospital; I was present, but had no evi-dence to give. The witnesses, besides Dr. Hutchinson, were Dante Rossetti, Swin-burne, and Mrs. Birrell, the housekeeper for the various Chambers at 14, Chatham Place. She testified, among other things, to uniformly affectionate relations between the husband and wife. There was but one inference to be formed from the evidence, namely, that Mrs. Rossetti had, by misad-venture, taken an overdose of laudanum, and the jury at once returned a verdict of accidental death. ¶ She lies buried in Highgate Cemetery, in the grave where my father had already been interred; my blank page Text appears in two columns on the page.

Dante Rossetti andElizabethSiddal

mother and my sister Christina have joined them there. Dante Rossetti, as it has often been recorded, buried in her coffin the mass of his poems, which had then recently been announced for publication. He chose to make this sacrifice to her memory, and for more than seven years thereafter he was un-able to bring out the intended volume. At last, in October 1869, the manuscript was uncoffined, and the publication ensued. ¶ With the aim of throwing a little light on Lizzie's character and demeanour, I will extract here a few sentences from letters written by Ruskin to Rossetti, and by Ros-setti to Allingham. ¶ Ruskin.—April 30,1855:—“My feeling at the first reading is that it would be best for you to marry, for the sake of giving Miss Siddal complete protection and care, and putting an end to the peculiar sadness, and want of you hardly know what, that there is in both of you.”1860.—“It is not possible you should care much for me, seeing me so seldom. I wish Lizzie and you liked me enough to—say—put on a dressing-gown and run in for a minute rather than not see me. Perhaps you both like me better than I suppose you do, but I have no power in general of be-lieving much in people's caring for me. I've a little more faith in Lizzie than in you—because, though she don't see me, her bride's kiss was so full and queenly-kind.” Rossetti.—July 24,1854:—“I wish, and she wishes, that something should be done by her to make a beginning, and set her mind a little at ease about her pursuit of art; and we both think that this, more than anything, would be likely to have a good effect on her health. It seems hard to me when I look at her sometimes, working or too ill to work; and think how many, without one tithe of her genius or great-ness of spirit, have granted them abundant health and opportunity to labour through the little they can or will do, while perhaps her soul is never to bloom nor her bright hair to fade; but, after hardly escaping from degradation and corruption, all she might have been must sink out again unprofitablyin that dark house where she was born.How truly she may say, ‘No man cared for my soul.’ I do not mean to make myself an exception; for how long I have known her, and not thought of this till so late—perhaps too late!” November 29, 1860.—“Indeed, and of course, my wife does draw still. Her last designs would, I am sure, surprise and delight you, and I hope she is going to do better than ever now. I feel surer every time she works that she has real genius—none of your make-believe—in conception and colour; and, if she can only add a little more of the precision in carrying-out which it so much needs health and strength to attain, she will, I am sure, paint such pictures as no woman has painted yet. But it is no use hoping for too much." ¶ Elizabeth Siddal developed a genuine faculty for verse as well as for painting—both assuredly under the stress of Rossetti's prompting. Mr. Swinburne, in writing to me, expressed the quality of her verse with equal intuition and precision. “Watts [Theodore Watts-Dunton] greatly admires her poem [“A Year and a Day”], which is as new to me as to him; I need not add that I agree with him. There is the same note of originality in discipleship which distinguishes her work in art—Gabriel's influence and example not more perceptible than her own independence and freshness of inspiration.” The amount of verse which she produced was, I take it, very small; certainlywhat remains in my hands is scanty. In two of my publications I have printed nine specimens. Since then I have de-ciphered six others scrappily jotted down, and I may one of these days publish all the six. I here extract one of them:—

<hi rend="c">A SILENT WOOD.</hi> O silent wood, I enter thee With a heart so full of misery, For all the voices from the trees And the ferns that cling about my knees. In thy darkest shadow let me sit, When the grey owls about thee flit; Text appears in two columns on the page.

The Burlington Magazine, Number III

 There I will ask of thee a boon, That I may not faint, or die, or swoon. Gazing through the gloom like one Whose life and hopes are also done, Frozen like a thing of stone, I sit in thy shadow—but not alone. Can God bring back the day when we two stood Beneath the clinging trees in that dark wood?

¶ When Christina Rossetti was putting to-gether in 1865 her volume “The Prince's <lb/>Progress and other Poems,” she raised a sug-gestion that she might perhaps include two or three specimens of Lizzie's verse, giving, of course, the authoress's name. Christina then, for the first time, read the composi-tions sent to her by Dante Gabriel, and she wrote, “How full of beauty they are, but how painful!” She thought them “almost too hopelessly sad for publication en masse .” The poetry of Christina herself has often been arraigned for excessive melancholy, though not, I think, quite accurately, for what it really exhibits is in the main re-nunciation—a disregard for the beauties and allurements of this world, in the effort to scale a steeper path, and in the light of a higher hope. The proposed printing of Lizzie's poems did not come to effect—probably both Dante and Christina agreed in thinking it better that they should remain in manuscript for the present. ¶ I will now come to the drawings by Dante Ros-setti which form our illustrations. For a series of years, of which 1854 may be taken as the centre, he made a more than copious set of drawings of Miss Siddal; very gene-rally representing her as she actually was and looked, only occasionally treating her figure as a study of action antecedent to some painting. When those sketches had become numerous, and no doubt littery (for Dante Gabriel's studio was not a model of orderly neatness), a friend of his, Lady Dal-rymple, presented him with a large hand-some volume into which they could be col-lected; and collected they were, and formed for years a great attraction to visitors in his studio. Some of them were given away or otherwise dispersed from time to time; a considerable number still remained at the date of my brother's death in 1882. Here is the testimony which Madox Brown, in his diary of October 6, 1854, bore to the quality of these drawings:—“Called on Dante Rossetti. Saw Miss Siddal, looking thinner and more deathlike and more beau-tiful and more ragged than ever; a real artist, a woman without parallel for many a long year. Gabriel, as usual, diffuse and inconsequent in his work. Drawing won-derful and lovely Guggums one after an-other, each one a fresh charm, each one stamped with immortality.” Here also is the testimony of Ruskin, in a letter ad-dressed to my brother, September 4, 1860: he appears to have called in Chatham Place without finding any one at home. “I looked over all the book of sketches at Chatham Place yesterday. I think Ida should be very happy to see how much more beauti-fully, perfectly, and tenderly you draw when you are drawing her than when you draw anybody else. She cures you of all your worst faults when you only look at her.” ¶ I will take in order the illustra-tions here supplied. The first I consider to be the best of all, both as a drawing and as a likeness; it strongly confirms the accu-racy of the portrait already mentioned, which Miss Siddal painted of herself. In the pencil design the expression is more than commonly grave, and seems to give evidence of ill-health; the date is Septem-ber 1854, nearly the same date as our ex-tract from Brown's diary. She is seated “in that armchair which suits your size,” as Rossetti phrased it in a valentine of about this period. The second and third in order are fair likenesses, but in the latter there is a certain petitesse about the lower part of the face which detracts from the resem-blance. The fourth drawing gives the face truly, yet not very characteristically; the pose is a pretty one, and counts for more than the visage. Of the last nearly the blank page Text appears in two columns on the page.

Dante Rossetti andElizabethSiddal

same may be said, but the face here, in its reposeful quiet, presents more of the aspect which prevailed in Miss Siddal, or even predominated. These five designs, taken collectively, may be regarded as marking a very fair average of the series eulogized by Brown and by Ruskin. Some were still better than these; some others slighter or less observable. It may be remarked that in all the five the dress is full and loose, without any trimming or ornament. Two or three of the other sketches were sent to Professor Norton at the time when he returned to Rossetti the water-colour of Clerk Saunders. There were, I think, at least three care-ful and very successful drawings done of Lizzie in her married days: not many more than that, if we except heads introduced in-to subject-paintings. ¶ The best list extant of paintings and drawings by my brother is, it is well known, that given by Mr. H. C. Marillier in his sumptuous volume “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 1899. I will extract from it the more important works in which Elizabeth Siddal's face appears:—1850, Rossovestita ; 1851, Beatrice at a Marriage <lb/>Feast Denying her Salutation to Dante ; 1852, The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice <lb/>in Eden ; 1853, Dante Drawing an Angel <lb/>in Memory of Beatrice ; 1855, The An-<lb/>nunciation (Mary washing clothes in a rivu-let), Paolo and Francesca da Rimini , Dante's <lb/>Vision of Rachel and Leah , The Maids of <lb/>Elfen-Mere ; 1856, Passover in the Holy <lb/>Family ; 1857, Designs for the Illustrated <lb/>Tennyson , The Tune of Seven Towers , The <lb/>Blue Closet , Wedding of St. George ; 1858, A Christmas Carol , Hamlet and Ophelia ; 1860, Bonifazio's Mistress , How they met <lb/>Themselves ; 1861, The Rose Garden , Regina Cordium ; 1862, St. George and <lb/>the Princess Sabra ; 1863, Beata Beatrix . Of portraits of Lizzie, Mr. Marillier cata-logues eleven, but this is a mere trifle as compared with the actual total. ¶ As to Miss Siddal's own designs, I may mention, besides those already specified, Jephthah's<lb/> Daughter, The Deposition from the Cross, The Maries at the Sepulchre, The Madonna <lb/>and Child with an Angel, Macbeth taking <lb/>the Dagger from his Wife who meditates <lb/>Suicide, The Lady of Shalott, St. Cecilia, <xref doc="a.op7.rap">The Woful Victory</xref> . The St. Cecilia was evidently intended to illustrate Tennyson's poem The Palace of Art. It is a different composition from the same subject as treated by Dante Rossetti, but, like that, it cer-tainly indicates the death of the saint (a point which does not appertain to the poem), and I have no doubt it preceded Rossetti's design, and therefore this detail of inven-tion properly belongs to Miss Siddal. <xref doc="a.op7.rap">The <lb/>Woful Victory</xref> is an incident which was to be introduced into Rossetti's poem <xref doc="a.2-1848.s221.raw" workcode="n1.b95">The <lb/>Bride's Prelude</xref> ; that work, however, was not brought to completion, and the inci-dent was never put into verse, but it ap-pears in the published prose argument of the poem. I must not beguile the reader into supposing that these designs by Miss Siddal are works of any developed execu-tion: some of them are extremely, and all comparatively, slight. But there is right thought in all of them, and a right inten-tion as to how the thought should be con-veyed in the structure of the composition. ¶ Specimens of Elizabeth Siddal's art are to be found in four books known to me—perhaps not in any others. These are “ Tennyson and his Preraphaelite Illustra-<lb/>tors ,” by G. Somes Layard, 1894; “ Dante <lb/>Rossetti's Letters to William Allingham ,” edited by Dr. Birkbeck Hill, 1897; “ The <lb/>English Preraphaelite Painters ,” by Percy H. Bate, 1899; and Marillier's book previously named, “ <xref doc="a.nd497.r8.m33.rad" workcode="n1.b95">Dante Gabriel Rossetti</xref> ,” 1899. There is likewise her portrait of herself in my Memoir of Dante Rossetti published along with his Family letters, 1895. ¶ I will conclude this brief account of Eliza-beth Eleanor Siddal by saying that, with-out overrating her actual performances in either painting or poetry, one must fairly pronounce her to have been a woman of unusual capacities, and worthy of being espoused to a painter and poet.