By Madox Brown (the etching) and by W. M. Rossetti (the verses): Cordelia. For the belated No. 3 of The Germ we were much at a loss for an illustration. Mr. Brown offered to accommodate us by etching this design, one of a series from King Lear which he had drawn in Paris in 1844. That series, though not very sightly to the eye, is of extraordinary value for dramatic insight and energy. We gladly accepted, and he produced this etching with very little self-satisfaction, so far as the technique of execution is concerned. Dante Rossetti was to have furnished some verses for the etching; but for this he did not find time, so I was put in as a stopgap, and I am not sure that any reader of The Germ has ever thanked me for my obedience to the call of duty.
By Patmore: Essay on Macbeth. In this interesting and well-considered paper Mr. Patmore assumes that he was the first person to put into writing the opinion that Macbeth, before meeting with the witches, had already definitely conceived and imparted the idea of obtaining the crown of Scotland by wrongful means. I have always felt some uncertainty whether Mr. Patmore was really the first; if he was, it certainly seems strange that the train of reasoning which he furnishes in this essayforcible, even if we do not regard it as unanswerableshould not have presented itself to the mind and pen of some earlier writer. The Essay appears to have been left incomplete in at least one respect. In speaking of the fifth scene, the author refers to postponement of comment upon Macbeth's letter to his wife, and he leaves it for the present. But the comment never comes.
By Christina Rossetti: Repining. This rather long poem, written in December 1847 on a still broader scale, was never republished by the authoress, although all her other poems in The Germ were so. She did not think that its deservings were such as to call for republication. I apprehend that herein she exercised a wise discretion: none the less, when I was compiling the volume of her New Poems, issued in 1896, I included Repiningfor I think that some of the considerations which apply to the works of an author while living do not remain in anything like full force after death.
By Dante G. Rossetti: The Carillon, Antwerp and Bruges. These verses, and some others further on in The Germ, were written during the brief trip, in Paris and Belgium, which my brother made along with Holman-Hunt in the autumn of 1849. He did not republish The Carillon; but he left in MS. an abridged form of it, with the title Antwerp and Bruges, and this I included in his Collected Works, 1886. The only important change was the omission of stanzas 1 and 4.
By Dante G. Rossetti: From the Cliffs, Noon. Altering some phrases in this lyric, and adding two stanzas, Rossetti republished it under the name of The Sea-limits.
By W. M. Rossetti: Fancies at Leisure. The first four were written to bouts-rimés: not the fifth, The Fire Smouldering, which is, I think, as old as 1848, or even 1847.
By John L. Tupper: Papers of the MS. Society; No. 1, An Incident in the Siege of Troy. This grotesque outburst, though sprightly and clever, was not well-suited to the pages of The Germ. My attention had been called to it at an earlier date, when my editorial power was unmodified, but I then staved it off, and indeed John Tupper himself did not deem it appropriate. It will be observed that MS. Society is said not to mean Manuscript Society. I forget what it did meanpossibly Medical Student Society. The whole thing is replete with semi-private sous-entendus, and banter at Free Trade, medical and anatomical matters, etc. The like general remarks apply to No. 4, Smoke, by the same writer. It is a rollicking semi-intelligible chaunt, a forcible thing in its way, proper in the first instance (I believe) to a sort of club of medical students, Royal Academy students, and othershighly-seasoned smokers most of themin which John Tupper exercised a quasi-privacy, and was called (owing to his thinness, much over-stated in the poem) The Spectro-cadaveral King. No. 5, Rain, is again by John Tupper, and is the only item in The Papers of the MS. Society which seems, in tone and method, to be reasonably appropriate for The Germ.
By Alexander Tupper: No. 2, Swift's Dunces.
By George I. F. Tupper: No. 3, Mental Scales. This also, in the scrappy condition which it here presents, reads rather as a joke than as a serious proposition: I believe it was meant for the latter.
By John L. Tupper: Viola and Olivia. The verses are not of much significance. The etching by Deverell, however defective in technique, claims more attention, as the Viola was drawn from Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, whom Deverell had observed in a bonnet-shop some few months before the etching was done, and who in 1860 became the wife of Dante Rossetti. This face does not give much idea of hers, and yet it is not unlike her in a way. The face of Olivia bears some resemblance to Christina Rossetti: I think however that it was drawn, not from her, but from a sister of the artist.
By John Orchard: A Dialogue on Art. The brief remarks prefacing this dialogue were written by Dante Rossetti. The diction of the dialogue itself was also, at Orchard's instance, revised to some minor extent by my brother, and I dare say by me. Orchard was a painter of whom perhaps no memory remains at the present day: he exhibited some few pictures, among which I can dimly remember one of The Flight of Archbishop Becket from England. His age may, I suppose, have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight years at the date of his death. In our circle he was unknown; but, conceiving a deep admiration for Rossetti's first exhibited picture (1849), The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, he wrote to him, enclosing a sonnet upon the picturea very bad sonnet in all executive respects, and far from giving promise of the spirited, if unequal, poetic treatment which we find in the lines in The Germ, On a Whit-Sunday Morn in the Month of May. This led to a call from Orchard to Rossetti. I think there was only one call, and I, as well as my brother, saw him on that occasion. Afterwards, he sent this dialogue for The Germ. The dialogue has always, and I think justly, been regarded as a remarkable performance. The form of expression is not impeccable, but there is a large amount of eloquence, coming in aid of definite and expansive thought. From what is here said it will be understood that Orchard was quite unconnected with the P.R.B. He expressed opinions of his own which may indeed have assimilated in some points to theirs, but he was not in any degree the mouthpiece of their organization, nor prompted by any member of the Brotherhood. In the dialogue, the speaker whose opinions appear manifestly to represent those of Orchard himself is Christian, who is mostly backed up by Sophon. Christian forces ideas of purism or puritanism to an extreme, beyond anything which I can recollect as characterizing any of the P.R.B. His upholding of the painters who preceded Raphael as the best men for nurturing new and noble developments of art in our own day was more in their line. In my brother's prefatory note a question is raised of publishing any other writings which Orchard might have left behind. None such, however, were found. Dr. W. C. Bennett (afterwards known as the author of Songs for Sailors, etc.), who had been intimate with Orchard, aided my brother in his researches.
By F. G. Stephens (called Laura Savage on the wrapper): Modern Giants.
By Dante G. Rossetti: Pax Vobis. Republished by the author, with some alterations, under the title of World's Worth.