quiet sea thronged with ships from strange waters. Below, in the centre of the design, is a deep court, with a tree very much out of perspective, and a man at a draw-well. This, as will be apprehended from the foregoing description, is really an illustration for the poem, not of any verse therein; but if it is not an interpretation it is a creation, and therefore interesting in its very disassociation from the work of the poet.

Regarding this design, Mr. Ruskin's words may be remembered in the appendix to his Elements of Drawing where, after referring to the cutting on the wood being bad, especially in rendering the expression of the faces, he adds, "This is especially the case in the St. Cecily, Rossetti's first illustration to the Palace of Art which would have been the best in the book had it been well engraved. The whole work should be taken up again, and done by line-engraving, perfectly; and wholly from Preraphaelite designs, with which no other modern work can bear the least comparison Relative to the last clause, there is a true and somewhat similar remark in M. Prosper Mérimée's Essay in Les Beaux Arts en Angleterre.

The companion illustration is much simpler both in conception and execution. It represents "mythic Uther's deeply wounded son" lying dozing in Avalon, with round him ten weeping and watching queens; while the strange barque that brought him there is moored beyond the rocky shore, and what looks like a small chapel stands on the farther desolate coast. It is not the Avalon of legend, but the Avalon of the artist, sad with the gloom of a strange land and a strange doom. One of the queens is recognisable as having been modelled on the artist's sister, Christina.

The last of the designs for this volume, and the most beautiful, is that illustrative of the third stanza of Sir Galahad. The "Maiden-knight" has reached some lonely sanctuary, having heard afar off in the wood a noise as of chanted hymns; before the altar in the sacred shrine, where he has arrived seeing neither worshipper nor habitant, the tapers burn, and in their light the silver sacramental vessels gleam; while, standing on rough wooden stairs, he bows before it, stooping to make the sign of the cross on his face with the holy water in a vessel suspended on a beam. In front, between and above him and the altar, a slanted bell is giving forth its solemn clang, tolled by (to him) unseen nuns, singing at intervals strange chants. Beyond in the forest darkness his horse, clad with white banner with a red cross, and impatiently pawing the ground, awaits him. This design is simple and impressive to a high degree, and poet and artist seem mutual interpreters.

The illustration to Mr. Allingham's book is for some lines in the poem called The Maids of ElfenMere; the subject being the appearance of the three maids to the dreamy boy, who pines away, and ultimately dies. This design has been so spoilt in the cutting, it is difficult to decide what rank it should take. Regarding this design, the following words, known to have been written by Mr. Burne Jones as long ago as 1856 in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, will be of interest to many possessing, or acquainted with, the Day and Night Songs (2d series):

"There is one more I cannot help noticing for its marvellous beauty, a drawing of higher finish and pretension than the last, from the pencil of Rossetti, in

Allingham's Day and Night Songs, just published. It is, I think, the most beautiful drawing for an illustration I have ever seen; the weird faces of the maids of Elfen-Mere, the musical, timid movement of their arms together as they sing, the face of the man, above all, are such as only a great artist could conceive."

Compared with the innumerable book-illustrations of his quondam coadjutor, Mr. Millais, Rossetti has done but little in this important if till lately and even yet much neglected and abused branch of art; yet of such quality is this scanty production that if nothing else were to be preserved of the great painter who has so lately gone from our midst, it is certain that the record of his worth would not find contradiction in these designs, showing as they do the original creative power of a true artist. Probably one reason of this paucity in illustrative design might be found in the incessantly active imagination of Rossetti, an imagination especially individual and peculiar, rendering him averse to expend labour in interpretation of another's thoughts when so plentiful were his own conceptions. Indeed this very fertility of conception militated against many achievements on a large scale, for the temptation to embody a new idea before the last had reached from the sketch state to the oil painting was often too great to be resisted; hence, in viewing the sum total of this painter's works, we find the germs of important pictures in pen and ink, chalk, and watercolour drawings never utilised.1 The creative faculty

1 Another, and a very potent reason, for this, is the fact that his small purchasing public were in general desirous of replicas of his famous single figure studies, or similar pictures, so that he had not the requisite encouragement to carry out all his noble designs. Indeed, some of his letters trying to induce intending purchasers to take his fine subjects instead of single figures are most pathetic.

I

when allied with slow executive power, as was the case with Rossetti, naturally predisposes a painter against the labour entailed in high finish on a large scale, and to a preference for the more rapid mediums of pencil, chalk, and water-colour: hence some of the most important and striking creations of this artist have never reached beyond the limits of small watercolours or drawings, as, for instance, the powerful Death of Lady Macbeth, and the strange How They Met Themselves. Such designs were always, or generally, meant for future enlargement; but only comparatively now and again did this occur, for new ideas were ever pleading for expression. An intense fervour characterises Rossetti's work from the earliest days of crude execution and forced colour to his last great painting, the impressive Salutation of Beatrice; and the same words might be spoken of this characteristic as Ruskin used in speaking of Preraphaelite work in general: "None but the ignorant could be unconscious of its truth, and none but the insincere regardless of it." 1

In a recently-published essay on Rossetti as an artist, the author writes thus: "But there is another barrier besides mysticism between this artist and the public. His ultimate sum-total of female or, indeed, of male beauty is not, from a public standpoint, very sympathetic." Yet it is in his female facial beauty that Rossetti has surpassed all living painters. It is surely admissible to say that he has given an individual spiritual significance to the female face such as art has not yet recorded, invested it with a charm of spiritual beauty wholly original. The type may or

1 Lectures on Painting and Architecture. Edinburgh, 1853. Addenda to Fourth Lecture.

may not be of the highest, may or may not appeal to many, but it is undoubtedly a type such as we look in vain for elsewhere in antecedent and, indeed, in contemporary art; and there are occasions when the intensity of its inner significance is so strong as to constrain the beholder to the strange spiritual personality represented, alone, leaving him altogether oblivious to the details of the rendering. Take such instances as Proserpina, or Pandora, or Beata Beatrix, or La Pia, or Mnemosyne, or Sybilla Palmifera, and it will be impossible not to recognise that a new spiritual type of the female face has been given to the art of the world by Dante Rossetti. Personally, Mnemosyne has for me a special fascination: the eyes of this lovely portraiture of idealised memory are as "sweet and subtle" as those of De Quincey's Mater Lachrymarum, "filled with perished dreams," like those of his Mater Suspiriorum. Again, what wonderful expression has the face of Beatrice in Beata Beatrix, despite the closed eyelids and the passive trance condition; indeed, what has been said by one of the most masterly and cultivated art-writers of our time, Mr. Walter Pater, of Michelangelo, may in the last phrase be said of Dante Rossetti: "No one ever expressed more truly than Michelangelo the notion of inspired sleep, of faces charged with dreams."1 As to the essayist's further remarks with reference to Rossetti's subjects, and their treatment being foreign to common sympathies, it is simply, as regards his art-work, the question of the old divergence between

1 The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. By Walter Pater, Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Macmillan and Co. One of those books which no lover as well as student of high art can afford to be without, full as it is of the higher criticism and the most sympathetically interpretive spirit.