whom Rossetti was the leader. These youths had enjoyed no
practical training in that particularly artificial branch of art,
mural painting, and yet it seems strange that Rossetti himself, at
least, should not have understood that a vehicle, such as yolk of egg
mixed with vinegar, was absolutely necessary to tempera, or that it
was proper, in fresco-painting, to prepare the walls, and paint in the
fresh wet mortar. They used no vehicle, they fixed their colors in no
coat of plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the
naked brick. The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts
are now decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible,
however, to ascend the gallery of the Oxford Union and examine the
ghostly frescoes that are fading there, without great interest and
even emotion. Of the young men who painted there under Gabriel
Rossetti's eye, all have become greatly distinguished. Mr. Edward
Burne-Jones, Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Spencer Stanhope were
undergraduates at Oxford. Mr. Valentine Prinsep and Mr. Arthur Hughes,
I believe, were Royal Academy students who were invited down by
Rossetti. Their work was naive and queer to the last degree. It is
perhaps not fair to say which one of them found so much difficulty in
painting the legs of his figures that he drew an impenetrable covert
of sunflowers right across his picture, and only showed the faces of
his heroes and heroines between the golden disks.

The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which also dates from the year
1856, is a still more notable expression of budding genius than the
dome of the Oxford Union. It was edited by Mr. Godfrey Lushington, all
its articles were anonymous, and it contrived to exist through twelve
consecutive monthly numbers. A complete set is now rare, and the
periodical itself is much less known than befits such a receptacle of
pure literature. It contains three or four of Rossetti's finest poems;
a great many of those extraordinary pieces, steeped in mediaeval
coloring, which Mr. William Morris was to collect in 1858 into his
bewitching volume, called "The Defence of Guenevere;" several
delightful prose stories of life in the Middle Ages, also by Mr.
Morris, which, like certain prose romances by Mr. Burne-Jones, have
never been publicly claimed or reprinted by their author; and not a
little else that was as new as it was notable. A little later Mr.
William Morris's first book was dedicated "To my Friend