(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture._)]
He was barely eighteen when he became a pupil at the Royal Academy, studying a couple of years later under Madox Brown, who was not many years older than himself. Even then Rossetti had an almost mesmeric influence upon his friends. He was a pale, tall, thin young man, who always walked with a slight stoop; reserved, dry in his manner, and careless in dress, there was nothing captivating about him at a transitory meeting. But his pale face was lit up by his unusually reflective, deeply clouded, contemplative eyes; and about his defiant mouth there played that contempt of the profane crowd which is natural to a superior mind, while the laurel of fame was already twined about his youthful forehead. In 1849, when he was exhibiting his earliest picture, he had published in _The Germ_, to say nothing of his numerous poems, a mystical, visionary, sketch in prose named _Hand and Soul_, which was much praised by men of the highest intellect in London. Soon afterwards he published a volume entitled _Dante and his Circle_, in which he translated a number of old Italian poems, and rendered Dante's _Vita Nuova_ into strictly archaic English prose. Reserved as he was towards strangers, he was irresistibly attractive to his friends, and his brilliant, genial conversation won him the goodwill of every one. A man of gifted and delicate nature, sensitive to an extreme degree, a sedentary student who had yet an enthusiasm for knightly deeds, a jaded spirit capable of morbidly heightened, exotic sensibility and soft, melting reverie, one whose overstrained nerves only vibrated if he slept in the daytime and worked at night, it seemed as though Rossetti was born to be the father of the _décadence_, of that state of spirit which every one now perceives to be flooding Europe.
[Illustration: ROSSETTI. STUDY FOR ASTARTE SYRIACA.]