He and Horne and Image and one
or two others shared a man-servant and an old house in Charlotte
Street, Fitzroy Square, typical figures of transition, doing as an
achievement of learning and of exquisite taste what their
predecessors did in careless abundance. All were Pre-Raphaelite,
and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or other a ragged
figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon, the Pre-
Raphaelite painter, once the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne,
but fresh now from some low public house. Condemned to a long term
of imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk into
drunkenness and misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man
who mistook him, in the dim candle light, for another Solomon, a
successful academic painter and R. A., he started to his feet in a
rage with 'Sir, do you dare to mistake me for that mountebank?'
Though not one had harkened to the feeblest caw, or been spattered
by the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran,
Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs, I began by suspecting them of
lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicion
that I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to become the
greatest English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenth
century and to write the one standard work on Botticelli.
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