It is a pity that the publication is to stop.  English artists have hitherto worked each one by himself, with too little of common purpose, too little of mutual support, too little of distinct and steadily pursued intellectual object.  We do not believe that they are one whit more jealous than the followers of other professions.  But they are less forced to be together, and the little jealousies which deform the natures of us all have in their case, for this reason, freer scope, and tend more to isolation.  Here, at last, we have a school, ignorant it may be, conceited possibly, as yet with but vague and unrealised objects, but working together with a common purpose, according to certain admitted principles, and looking to one another for help and sympathy.  This is new in England, and we are very anxious it should have a fair trial.  Its aim, moreover, however imperfectly attained as yet, is high and pure.  No one can walk along our streets and not see how debased and sensual our tastes have become.  The saying of Burke (so unworthy of a great man), that vice loses half its evil by losing all its grossness, is practically acted upon, and voluptuous and seductive figures, recommended only by a soft effeminacy, swarm our shop-windows and defile our drawing-rooms.  It is impossible to over-state the extent to which they minister to, and increase the foul sins of, a corrupt and luxurious age.  A school of artists who attempt to bring back the popular taste to the severe draperies and pure forms of early art are at least deserving of encouragement.  Success in their attempt would be a national blessing.

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Shrivelling in the Spring of 1850, “The Germ” showed no further sign of sprouting for many years, though I suppose it may have been known to the promoters of “The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” produced in 1856, and may have furnished some incitement towards that enterprise—­again an unsuccessful one commercially.  Gradually some people began to take a little interest in the knowledge that such a publication had existed, and to inquire after stray copies here and there.  This may perhaps have commenced before 1870, or at any rate shortly afterwards, as in that year the “Poems” of Dante Rossetti were brought out, exciting a great amount of attention and admiration, and curiosity attached to anything that he might have published before.  One heard of such prices as ten shillings for a set of the “The Germ,” then L2, L10, L30, etc., and in 1899 a copy handsomely bound by Cobden-Saunderson was sold in America for about L104.  Will that high-water mark ever be exceeded?  For the sake of common-sense, let us hope not.

I will now go through the articles in “The Germ” one by one.  Wherever any of them may seem to invite a few words of explanation I offer such to the reader; and I give the names of the authors, when not named in the magazine itself.  Those articles which do not call for any particular comment receive none here.