ggressively Gothic type, beginning, "When whoso merely hath a
little thought." This sonnet is my performance; it had been suggested
that one or other of the proprietors of the magazine should write a
sonnet to express the spirit in which the publication was undertaken.
I wrote the one here in question, which met with general acceptance;
and I do not remember that any one else competed. This sonnet may not
be a good one, but I do not see why it should be considered
unintelligible. Mr. Bell Scott, in his "Autobiographical Notes,"
expressed the opinion that to master the production would almost need
a Browning Society's united intellects. And he then gave his
interpretation, differing not essentially from my own. What I meant
is this: A writer ought to think out his subject honestly and
personally, not imitatively, and ought to express it with directness
and precision; if he does this, we should respect his performance as
truthful, even though it may not be important. This indicated, for
writers, much the same principle which the P.R.B. professed for
painters,--individual genuineness in the thought, reproductive
genuineness in the presentment.

By Thomas Woolner: "My Beautiful Lady," and "Of My Lady in Death."
These compositions were, I think, nearly the first attempts which Mr.
Woolner made in verse; any earlier endeavours must have been few and
slight. The author's long poem "My Beautiful Lady," published in
1863, started from these beginnings. Coventry Patmore, on hearing the
poems in September 1849, was considerably impressed by them: "the
only defect he found" (as notified in a letter from Dante Rossetti)
"being that they were a trifle too much in earnest in the passionate
parts, and too sculpturesque generally. He means by this that each
stanza stands too much alone, and has its own ideas too much to
itself."

By Ford Madox Brown: "The Love of Beauty: Sonnet."

By John L. Tupper: "The Subject in Art." Two papers, which do not
complete the important thesis here undertaken. Mr. Tupper was, for an
artist, a man of unusually scientific mind; yet he was not, I think,
distinguished by that power of orderly and progressive exposition
which befits an argumentation. These papers exhibit a good deal of
thought, and state several truths which, even if partial truths, are
not the less deserving of attention; but the dissertation does not
produce a very clear impression, inasmuch as there is too great a
readiness to plunge, _