CAINE'S ASSOCIATION WITH ROSSETTI.
Till the age of twenty-four he remained in Liverpool, earning his living in a builder's office, lecturing, starting societies, working as secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and writing for the papers. His lectures on Shakespeare attracted the attention of Lord Houghton, who expressed a desire to meet him. A meeting was arranged at the house of Henry Bright (the H.A.B, of Hawthorne); and the first thing that Lord Houghton, the biographer of Keats, said when Hall Caine came into the room was: "You have the head of Keats." He predicted that the young author would become a great critic. Another of Hall Caine's lectures, delivered during this period, "The Supernatural in Poetry," brought a long letter of eulogy from Matthew Arnold. His lecture on Rossetti won him the friendship of this great man, a correspondence ensued, and when Caine was twenty-five years old, Rossetti wrote and asked him to come up to London to see him. Caine went and was received most cordially.
"He met me on the threshold of his house," he relates, "with both hands outstretched, and drew me into his studio. That night he read me 'The King's Tragedy.'"
During the evening Rossetti asked him to remove to London and invited him to his house; at the same time—it may be to prepare him for their common life—he showed him, to Caine's horror, what a slave he had become to the chloral habit.
BISHOP'S COURT, WHERE DAN MYLREA IN "THE DREMSTER" WAS REARED.
It was not until many months later that Hall Caine determined to accept Rossetti's invitation, and went to share his monastic seclusion in his gloomy London house. In the meanwhile, and in this Rossetti had helped him by correspondence, he had edited for Elliot Stock an anthology of English sonnets, which was published under the title of "Sonnets of Three Centuries." For his work in connection with this volume Hall Caine received no remuneration. Indeed, at this period in his career the earnings of the writer who can to-day command the highest prices in the market, were very small indeed. His average income was two hundred and sixty pounds (thirteen hundred dollars), and of this two hundred pounds was earned as a draughtsman. When he went to live with Rossetti he had about fifty pounds (two hundred and fifty dollars) of money saved, to which he was afterwards able to add a sum of one hundred pounds, which Rossetti insisted on his accepting as his commission on the sale of Rossetti's picture, "Dante's Dream." It may be mentioned, to dispel certain misstatements, that this was the only financial transaction which took place between the two friends. His life in Rossetti's house was the life of a monk, seeing nobody except Burne-Jones (whom, as Ruskin will have it, he resembles closely), going nowhere and doing little. "I used to get up at noon," he says, "and usually spent my afternoon in walking about in the garden. I did not see Rossetti till dinner-time, but from that hour till three or four in the morning we were inseparable." It has been stated that Caine owed much of his success in literature to Rossetti. This is only partly true. His introduction to literary society in London under Rossetti's wing was harmful rather than advantageous to him, for it prejudiced people against him; and his connection with Rossetti, which was that of a spiritual son with a spiritual father, was misrepresented. He was spoken of as Rossetti's secretary, even as Rossetti's valet. On the other hand, so young a man could not but derive benefit from the society of so refined an artist, who had no thought nor ambition outside his art. And, in a practical way, Rossetti also benefited him. When he first came to Rossetti's house he was under an engagement to deliver twenty-four lectures on "Prose Fiction" in Liverpool, and in preparation of these lectures began studying the English novelists.
KIRK MAUGHOLD, WHICH FIGURES IN "THE BONDMAN" AND "THE MANXMAN."
"One day Rossetti suggested that, instead of reading these novels alone, I should read them aloud to him. From that day on, night after night, for months and months, I used to read to him. I read Fielding and Smollett, Richardson, Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis, Thackeray, and Dickens, under a running fire of comment and criticism from Rossetti. It was terrible labor, this reading for hours night after night, till dawn came and I could drag myself wearily upstairs to bed. But it was a very useful study, and this is indeed the debt which I owe to Rossetti."