On the wrapper of each number is to be found a sonnet, printed in a rather aggressively 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, in medias res, checked by too great a tendency to harking back, and re-stating some conclusion in modified terms and with insecure corollaries.  Two points which Mr. Tupper chiefly insists upon are:  (1) that the subject in a work of art affects the beholder in the same sort of way as the same subject, occurring as a fact or aspect of Nature, affects him; and thus whatever in Nature excites the mental and moral emotion