at the time a startling occurrence, but
has doubtless frequently happened to others, and has certainly
since happened to myself without provoking quite so much outcry. The
blood-spitting to which Rossetti here alleges he was liable was of
a comparatively innocent nature. In later years he was assuredly not
altogether a hero as to personal suffering, and I afterwards found that,
upon the periodical recurrence of the symptom, he never failed to become
convinced that he spat arterial blood, and that on each occasion he had
received his death-warrant. Proof enough was adduced that the blood came
from the minor vessels of the throat, and this was undoubtedly the case
in the majority of instances, but whether the same explanation applied
to one alarming occurrence which I shall now recount, seems to me
uncertain.

During the two or three weeks preceding our departure for Cumberland,
in the autumn of 1881, during the time of our residence there and during
the first few weeks after our return to London, Rossetti was afflicted
by a violent cough. I noticed that it troubled him almost exclusively in
the night-time, and after the taking of chloral; that it was sometimes
attended by vomiting; and that it invariably shook his whole system
so terribly as to leave him for a while entirely prostrate from sheer
physical exhaustion. The spectacle was a painful one, and I watched
closely its phenomena, with the result of convincing myself that
whatever radical mischief lay at the root of it, the damage done was
seriously augmented by a conscious giving way to it, induced, I thought,
by hope of the relief it sometimes afforded the stomach to get rid of
the nauseous drug at a moment of reduced digestive vitality. Then it
became my fear that in these violent and prolonged retchings internal
injury might be sustained, and so I begged him to try to restrain the
tendency to cough so much and often. He took the remonstrance with great
goodnature (observing that he perceived I thought he was putting it on),
but I was not conscious that at any moment he acted upon my suggestion.
At the time in question I was under the necessity of leaving him for
a day or two every week in order to fulfil, a course of lecturing
engagements at a distance; and upon my return in each instance I was
told much of all that had happened to him in the interval. On one
occasion, however, I was conscious that something had occurred of which
he desired to make a disclosure,