His early work had all the purity and intensity of feeling of the primitive Italians, and the designs alluded to are of a little later period and of his highest imaginative activity.

Had he always maintained the elevation of that period he would have done more and better work, but he fell into irregularities of life which wasted his powers and destroyed the precious exaltation of his early art.

The sensuous quality of his painting, the harmony of color and the play of it, like the same qualities in his poetry, remained as long as I knew anything of his life, but his drawing and even his intellectual powers fell off through his unsystematic, excessive demands on them, night work and overwork.

In his later years his work was nearly always more or less jaded, his eye failing in the perception of forms, as has so often been the case in even the greatest painters in their decay.
No doubt chloral was ultimately one of the agencies of his prostration, though not of his death, but he did not have recourse to it until his power of recuperation from overwork had begun to fail; and, when he had become accustomed to the effect of the chloral, he took it as the means of a form of intoxication, a form well understood by those who have had any experience, personal or by observation, in the use of the drug.

The craving for this intoxicant, once it becomes a habit, is, like the use of morphia, invincible, and Rossetti indulged in it to such an extent that he used to take the original prescription to several druggists to obtain a quantity that one would not have given him.