William Butler Yeats

Four Years William Butler Yeats

I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by accident, and I had found "nothing I cared for after Titian-and Titian I knew chiefly from a copy of 'the supper of Emmaus' in Dublin-till Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites;" and among my father's friends were no Pre-Raphaelites. Some indeed had come to Bedford Park in the enthusiasm of the first building, and others to be near those that had. There was Todhunter, a well-off man who had bought my father's pictures while my father was still Pre-Raphaelite. Once a Dublin doctor he was a poet and a writer of poetical plays: a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good scholar and a good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exasperated friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over matters of opinion.