The crisis came long after my close personal relations with him had ceased, and I had become only an occasional correspondent, living in Italy.

But to make his decline the consequence of the use of chloral, even when it was finally become habitual, as some do, is absurd.

It had been prescribed for him by a competent physician, because some remedy for his malady had become necessary.

Even before I had recommended his first experiment with it he had been incapacitated from work by sleeplessness, and was in a very precarious condition of nerves and brain, and, though he recovered at Robertsbridge a comparative health, so that he was enabled to do some of his best work, his return to London, and gradually to his old habits of life and work, ultimately reproduced the old symptoms.
During the earlier days of the return of the malady I was in London again and saw a great deal of him, was witness to his having become subject to illusions, and heard his declarations that he was beset by enemies and that he continually heard them in an adjoining room conspiring to attack him, and he attributed the savage criticism of Buchanan on his volume of poems to his being in the conspiracy to ruin him.

The attack of Buchanan had a most disastrous effect on his mind.
It was the first time that Rossetti had experienced the brutalities of criticism, and his sensitiveness was excessive.