From a letter to poet William Allingham. Hughes and Allingham both shared a mutual friendship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
“It was from Munro I had the story that D..G.R., having spent his honeymoon and all his money in Paris, was returning, when he read in the first paper he got on the way, of the sudden death of a friend (not a great friend at all, I think), a writer named Brough, one of the class of which James Hannay was a prominent type – a young man with a wife and two little children. Rossetti knew that ways and means would be doubly deficient to the widow in such circumstances. He had spent all his own now; but a certain portion of that listed in jewelry upon Mrs. Rossetti, who no doubt fully sympathized with the trouble in question, so that when reached London they did not go straight home, but drove first to a pawnbroker, and then to the Brough lodgings, and after that home, with entirely empty pockets; but, I expect, two very full hearts.
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