In September the frequent meetings were continued. The talk drifting here and there, touched upon many subjects belonging to no particular period, but characteristic of his moods and memories. Thus, one evening, when Mr. W. B. Blaikie was with us and the talk turned to Scotland, Whistler told stories of Carlyle. Allingham, he said, was for a time by way of being Carlyle's Boswell and was always at his heels. They were walking in the Embankment Gardens at Chelsea, when Carlyle stopped suddenly: "Have a care, mon, have a care, for ye have a tur-r-ruble faculty for developing into a bore!" Carlyle had been reading about Michael Angelo with some idea of writing his life or an essay, but it was Michael Angelo, the engineer, who interested him. Another day, walking with Allingham, they passed South Kensington Museum. "You had better go in," Allingham said. "Why, mon, only fools go in there." Allingham explained that he would find sculpture by Michael Angelo, and he should know something of the artist's work before writing his life. "No," said Carlyle, "we need only glance at that."
Whistler's talk of Howell and Tudor House overflowed with anecdotes of the adventurer, for whom he retained a tender regret, and the group gathered about Rossetti. He accounted for Howell's downfall by a last stroke of inventiveness when he procured rare, priceless black pots for a patron who later discovered rows of the same pots in an Oxford Street shop. Whistler had a special liking for the story of Rossetti dining at Lindsey Row, at the height of the blue and white craze, and becoming so excited when his fish was served on a plate he had never seen before that he forgot the fish and turned it over, fish and all, to look at the mark on the back. Another memory was of a dinner at Mr. Ionides', with Rossetti a pagan, Sir Richard Burton a Mohammedan, Lady Burton a Catholic. They fell into a hot argument over religion, but Whistler said nothing. Lady Burton, who was in a state of exaltation, could not stand his silence: "And what are you, Mr. Whistler?" "I, madam," he answered, "why, I am an amateur!" He spent many evenings drawing upon his memory of the "droll" and "joyous" things of the past. But the past brought him back with redoubled interest to the present, in which so much waited to be done.
In October we began to notice a change, and we knew that when he worried there was cause. He was called to Paris once or twice about the school and his "châteaux and pieds-à-terre." After one of these journeys he was laid up with a severe cold at Mr. Heinemann's. In November he was in bed for many days at Garlant's. He had other worries. British critics conspired either to ignore his success at the Paris Exhibition, or account for it sneeringly or lyingly. He was irritated when he read an article on the Exhibition, signed D. S. M., in the Saturday Review devoted altogether, he told us, to Manet and Fantin, with only a passing reference to himself:
PORTRAIT OF MRS. WALTER SICKERT
In the possession of Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson]
