One of the last letters I received from him must have concerned another of these little feasts which he had projected and which for some reason I was compelled to postpone. I cannot now recall what I then wrote to him, but I suppose my letter must have contained some reference to our long and close friendship, for I received from him in reply an affectionate little note that it is a pleasure to me to preserve.
“Dear Carr,” he writes, “I too feel just the same. I want years and years of us together, and much work and a little play. We will put it off for a week, then, and I will try and rearrange, and perhaps Tadema will join.—Yours affectionately,
E. B. J.”
Those “years and years” that would have been so dear to us were unhappily denied. He was often ailing in the later days of his life, and it was easy to perceive that he was sometimes apprehensive as to the condition of his health. And yet he never allowed his own anxieties to burden others. On one occasion I remember, and it must have been about this time, he told me he had been to see his doctor, who had questioned him closely as to his habits as a smoker.
“How many cigars do you smoke in a day?” he had inquired of his patient, to which Burne-Jones had carelessly replied:
“Oh, I think about six.”
“Well,” replied his adviser, “for the present you had better limit yourself to three.”
And in detailing the incident to me afterwards Burne-Jones added with a chuckle:
“You know, my dear Carr, I never did smoke more than three.”
When the end came, and came so swiftly, he left a gap in my life I well knew could never be filled again. I had not seen quite so much of him during the last three or four years of his life, but immediately preceding that period we had been closely associated in a task that lay very near my heart. I had asked him, with Irving’s concurrence, to undertake the designing of the scenery and costumes for my play of King Arthur, produced in 1894. At his request I went down to read him the play while he was at work in the garden studio of the Grange, and at its conclusion he announced, to my great delight, that he would willingly undertake the work. The subject was congenial to him; he was deeply versed in all Arthurian lore, and in his paintings he returned again and again to that great cycle of romance enshrined for English readers in the exquisite prose poem of Sir Thomas Malory.