By W. M. Rossetti:  “Fancies at Leisure.”  The first three of these were written to bouts-rimes.  As to No. 1, “Noon Rest,” I have a tolerably clear recollection that the rhymes were prescribed to me by Millais, on one of the days in 1849 when I was sitting to him for the head of Lorenzo in his first Praeraphaelite picture from Keats’s “Isabella.”  No. 4, “Sheer Waste,” was not a bouts-rimes performance.  It was chiefly the outcome of an early afternoon spent lazily in Regent’s Park.

By Walter H. Deverell:  “The Light Beyond.”  These sonnets are not of very finished execution, but they have a dignified sustained tone and some good lines.  Had Deverell lived a little longer, he might probably have proved that he had some genuine vocation as a poet, no less than a decided pictorial faculty.  He died young in February 1854.

By Dante G. Rossetti:  “The Blessed Damozel.”  As to this celebrated poem much might be said; but I shall not say it here, partly because I wrote an Introduction to a reprint (published by Messrs. Duckworth and Co. in 1898) of the “Germ” version of the poem, which is the earliest version extant, and in that Introduction I gave a number of particulars forestalling what I could now set down.  I will however take this opportunity of correcting a blunder into which I fell in the Introduction above mentioned.  I called attention to “calm” and “warm,” which make a “cockney rhyme” in stanza 9 of this “Germ” version; and I said that, in the later version printed in “The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine” in 1856, a change in the line was made, substituting “swam” for “calm,” and that the cockneyism, though shuffled, was not thus corrected.  In “The Saturday Review,” June 25, 1898, the publication of Messrs. Duckworth was criticized; and the writer very properly pointed out that I had made a crass mistake.  “Mr. Rossetti,” he said, “must be a very hasty reader of texts.  What is printed [in ‘The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine’] is ‘swarm,’ not ‘swam,’ and the rhyme with ‘warm’ is perfect, stultifying the editor’s criticism completely.”  Probably the critic considered my error as unaccountable as it was serious; and yet it could be fully accounted for, though not fully excused.  I had not been “a very hasty reader of texts” in the sense indicated by “The Saturday Review.”  The fact is that, not possessing a copy of “The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” I had referred to the book brought out by Mr. William Sharp in 1882, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti:  A Record and a Study,” in which are given (with every appearance of care and completeness) the passages of “The Blessed Damozel” as they appeared in “The Germ,” with the alterations printed in “The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.”  From the latter, the line in question is given by Mr. Sharp as “Waste sea of worlds that swam”; and I, supposing him to be correct (though I allow that memory ought to have taught me the contrary), reproduced that line to the same effect.  “Always verify your references” is a precept to which editors and commentators cannot too carefully conform.  Many thanks to the writer in “The Saturday Review” for showing that, while I, and also Mr. Sharp, had made a mistake, my brother had made none.