' Though I had answered 'no,' Ellis had only a few
days before used these words: 'Nettleship drank his genius away.'
Ellis, but lately returned from Perugia, where he had lived many
years, was another old friend of my father's but some years
younger than Nettleship or my father. Nettleship had found his
simplifying image, but in his painting had turned away from it,
while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man of
science, who was perhaps the last man in England to run the circle
of the sciences without superficiality, had never found that image
at all. He was a painter and poet, but his painting, which did not
interest me, showed no influence but that of Leighton. He had
started perhaps a couple of years too late for Pre-Raphaelite
influence, for no great Pre-Raphaelite picture was painted after
1870, and left England too soon for that of the French painters.
He was, however, sometimes moving as a poet and still more often
an astonishment. I have known him cast something just said into a
dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing to talk;
but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my
father thought he lacked all ambition.
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