British Museum at the age of 43, after which he
bought an estate in Sussex, where he realized his idea
of Felix Vaughan, the gentleman-farmer in The Angel
in the House. He improved his estate till it was too
expensive for him to live on, whereupon he sold it at
a great profit to the Duke of Norfolk, and himself
rented the manor-house of Old Hastings, a house on
which he had set his affections when he saw it as
a boy.

His first wife, Emily, daughter of Dr. William
Andrews, a Congregationalist minister, Ruskin's tutor
in Greek, was the inspiration of The Angel in the House,
but she was not the subject of it. The poem was
interrupted by her death, after fifteen years of marriage,
and Patmore was never able to complete it. The two
finished parts, The Angel (in quatrains) and The Victories
of Love (in couplets), represent, respectively, an ideally
perfect marriage in ideal circumstances, and an unideal
marriage heroically made perfect. The third part, of
which some of the poems in The Unknown Eros, and
other Odes are almost certainly fragments, was to have
dealt with 'the hope which remains for individual love
in death'.

After Emily's death, but not immediately after,
Patmore became a Roman Catholic -- a step which he
had often discussed with her until he found that it made
her so unhappy that in her weak state of health he had
perforce to let the subject drop. She died of consump-
tion in July 1862. His own chest was affected, and in
1863 he took a holiday in Rome with his friend Aubrey
de Vere, and there he met the lady who became his
second wife. Aubrey de Vere was a Roman Catholic,

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