The Grosvenor Gallery, opened in 1877, at once eclipsed Burlington House as the favourite target of Punch's ridicule and caricature, and as the home of all the tendencies which he repudiated in the manifesto quoted above. His general attitude is very much that of Gilbert in Patience; and Burne-Jones and Rossetti (whom he miscalls "D. S. Rosetti" as late as 1880) were indiscriminately confounded in dispraise along with the lesser fry. Tennyson's "Palace of Art" is perverted into a vehicle for assailing Pre-Raphaelitism. The "Dream of Queer Women" in 1878 gives prominence to the artistic type, and a visit to the Grosvenor Gallery in the early summer of the same year inspires "The Haunted Limbo; a May-night Vision" animated by the same hostility:—
Those women, ah, those women! They were white,
Blue, green, and grey—all hues, save those of nature,
Bony of frame, and dim, and dull of sight,
And parlous tall of stature.
Ars longa est—aye, very long indeed,
And long as Art were all these High-Art ladies,
And wan and weird; one might suppose the breed
A cross 'twixt earth and Hades.
If poor Persephone to the Dark King