these lovely creations, merely because they quicken some men's pulses.

"Kosmon. And to me, it appears hypercriticism to object to pictures, poems, and statues, calling them not works of art-or fine art-because they have no higher purpose than eye or eardelight. If this law be held to be good, very few pictures called of the English school-of the English school, did I say? -very few pictures at all, of any school, are safe from condemnation almost all the Dutch must suffer judgment, and a very large proportion of modern sculpture, poetry, and music, will not pass. Even Christobel and the Eve of St. Agnes could not

stand the ordeal.

"Christian. Oh Kalon, you hardly need an answer! What! Shall the artist spend weeks and months, nay, sometimes years, in thought and study, contriving and perfecting some beautiful invention, in order only that men's pulses may be quickened? What!-can he, Jesuit-like, dwell in the house of soul, only to discover where to sap her foundations ?-Satan-like, does he turn his angel of light into a fiend of darkness, and use his God-delegated might against its giver, making Astartes and Molochs to draw other thousands of innocent lives into the embraces of sin? And as for you, Kosmon, I regard purpose as I regard soul; one is not more the light of the thought than the other is the light of the body; and both, soul and purpose, are necessary for a complete intellect; and intellect of the intellectual of which the fine arts are the capital members-is not more to be expected than demanded. I believe that most of the pictures you mean are mere natural history paintings from the animal side of man. The Dutchman may, certainly, go Letheward; but for their colour, and subtleties of execution, they would not be tolerated by any man of taste."

The succeeding poem is also by Mr. Orchard, but shows no distinct poetic faculty. Modern Giants is a short paper by Frederick Stephens under the pseudonym of "Laura Savage." To the Castle Ramparts is a poem of over a hundred lines of blank verse, by William Rossetti, exhibiting the same love and intimate knowledge of certain aspects of nature characterising his

foregoing work in verse. This number also contains the Pax Vobis (afterwards reprinted as World's Worth in the reissue of 1881), and six sonnets by Gabrielthe latter being respectively A Virgin and Child, by Hans Memmling; A Marriage of St. Katherine, by the same; A Dance of Nymphs, by Mantegna; A Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione; Angelica rescued from the Sea Monster, by Ingres; and a second sonnet on the same. The latter four only were afterwards printed, and will be referred to farther on in Chapter VII. Between the Pax Vobis and the six sonnets are a Modern Idyl, by W. H. Deverell, and a sonnet, Jesus Wept, by the Editor; and succeeding the latter are the fourth and fifth papers of the MS. Society, by J. L. Tupperthe first, Smoke, being clever and amusing.

The Germ comes to an end with two contributions by its editor, the first a review of Browning's Christmas Eve and Easter Day, and the second the fine sonnet The Evil under the Sun. When it is remembered that the date of this review was a time when Browning's writings were caviare to the general public, and that most of the criticism he had received had been either antagonistic or unsympathetic, the notice in The Germ becomes still worthier of remembrance. Mr. Browning here found a warm advocate, an advocate who judged his poems not by any fixed standard but the standard of poetry; an advocate who would not say a poet like Mr. Browning was a poet because he acknowledged the individual principles of this, that, or of all the great poets, but simply because he was Mr. Browning and spoke fitly in accordance with his time and circumstance. Because Pope wrote in heroic couplets or Milton in blank verse of a peculiarly sonorous kind, it

is no reason why Browning should do so also if otherwise impelled. Each poet must find his own form, and then it will be seen that the form and the subject are so interdependent that they must be considered in union and not separately. The way to judge a picture or poem, argues Mr. Rossetti, is not to say "this picture or this poem is not as I should have conceived and executed," but "what is the author's intention, and has that intention, whatever be its limits, resulted in successful achievement ?" This method of criticism was not prevalent about 1850, and the hearts of painters and poets must have warmed towards the publicly unknown scribe in the unknown periodical.

The sonnet that concludes The Germ was written about eight months before its appearance in the magazine, namely, about October in 1849. It is the strongest and most individual poetic utterance of Mr. William Rossetti as yet referred to, having the simplicity and intense earnestness of another noble sonnet of the same order, The Massacre in Piedmont, of Milton. It has since been reprinted in Mr. T. Hall Caine's admirable selection of English sonnets by both contemporary and past writers entitled Sonnets of Three Centuries, appearing there under the improved title, Democracy Downtrodden, but with no alteration save the substitution of "here and there" instead of one or two" in the second line of the sestet.

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Altogether, a remarkable little volume; interesting because of the contributors who have since made their mark in the world, and interesting because of great part of the contents in themselves; remarkable because

of its being the official organ of the Preraphaelite or Protesting sect; and again remarkable because of the ability and promise frequently shown by writers still in their teens.

NOTE.-Those who would wish to trace further the youthful writings of some of our best-known poets and painters will find much to repay them in the " Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" for 1856, the practical outcome of "The Germ."

CHAPTER III.

ROSSETTI THE ARTIST-BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS—

DESIGNS-PAINTINGS.

IN the preceding chapter I spoke of the constant union of poetic emotion with the artistic idea in everything that came from the pencil or the brush of Dante Rossetti; and it is this union that raises the work of the great artist in question so much above the level of English art in general. It may or may not be true, as M. Henri Delaborde says in his essay Les Preraphaelites, that an inability to understand the chef-d'œuvres of the Italian school is a vice of the national temperament of the English; for mere traditional, what may be called Tourist admiration is no criterion of the impression high art makes upon our countrymen at large; but it is undoubtedly the case that poetic art, until very recently at any rate, has never obtained more than a grudging public recognition in England. Landscape art, poetically, that is ideally, treated, has achieved a decided eminence indeed, but even there the bugbear of "Fancifulness," "Unreality," haunts the average spectator. The æsthetic movement in England, so much parodied and ridiculed, has been no mere vagary of fashion, but the stirring of a really awakening love of art in the upper or cultivated classes, and the artistic spirit may at last