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—
Unto the man of yearning thought
And aspiration, to do nought
Is in itself almost an act,—
Being chasm-fire and cataract
Of the soul's utter depths unseal'd.
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