onnet _Nuptial Sleep_ is one
stanza, embodying, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural
universal function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have
shown that it is not here), to the exclusion of those other highest
things of which it is the harmonious concomitant.

It had become known that the article in the _Review_ was not the work
of the unknown Thomas Maitland, whose name it bore, and on this head
Rossetti wrote:

Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open
signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice,
however, not by annunciation) that if the anonymous in criticism
was--as itself originally indicated--but an early caterpillar stage,
the nominate too is found to be no better than a homely transitional
chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who
likes to sport in sunlight, and yet elude the grasp, is after all the
pseudonymous.

It transpired, in subsequent correspondence (of which there was more
than enough), that the actual writer was Mr. Robert Buchanan, then
a young author who had risen into distinction as a poet, and who was
consequently suspected, by the writers and disciples of the Rossetti
school, of being actuated much more by feelings of rivalry than
by desire for the public good. Mr. Buchanan's reply to the serious
accusation of having assailed a brother-poet pseudonymously was that the
false signature was affixed to the article without his knowledge,
"in order that the criticism might rest upon its own merits, and gain
nothing from the name of the real writer."

It was an unpleasant controversy, and what remains as an impartial
synopsis of it appears to be this: that there was actually manifest
in the poetry of certain writers a tendency to deviate from wholesome
reticence, and that this dangerous tendency came to us from France,
where deep-seated unhealthy passion so gave shape to the glorification
of gross forms of animalism as to excite alarm that what had begun with
the hideousness of _Femmes Damnees_ would not even end there; finally,
that the unpleasant truth demanded to be spoken--by whomsoever had
courage enough to utter it--that to deify mere lust was an offence and
an outrage. So much for the justice on Mr. Buchanan's side; with the
mistaken criticism linking the writers of Dante's time with French
writers of the time of Baudelaire it is hardly necessary to deal. On the
other hand, it must be said that