was first published with a poem, Ariadne, by W. J. Tate, in August 1866, long after King Warwolf first appeared. Its design is obviously based on this passage:

'My long hair floating in the boisterous wind,
My white hands lightly grasping Theseus' knees,
While he, his wild eyes staring, urged his slaves
To some last effort of their well-tried skill.'

But it requires a great effort of perverted imagination to drag in the picture, which shows a Greek hero on one ship, watching, you suppose, the dying Norse king on another ship; when the ballad infers, and the dramatic situation implies, that the old monarch put out at once across the bar, and his people from the shore watched his ship burn in the night. To wrench such a picture from its context, and apply it to another, was a too popular device of publishers. As, however, it preserves good impressions of blocks otherwise inaccessible, it would be ungracious to single out this particular instance for blame. Yet all the same, those who regard the artist's objection to the sale of clichés for all sorts of purposes, as a merely sentimental grievance, must own that he is justified in being annoyed, when the whole intention of his work is burlesqued thereby.

A contemporary review says that the illustrations had 'appeared before in Once a Week, The Cornhill, and elsewhere.' It would be a long and ungrateful task to collate them, but, so far as my own memory can be trusted, they are all from the first named. In place of including a description of the book itself, a few extracts, from a review by Mr. Edmund Gosse in the Academy (February 1876, p. 177), will not only give a vivid appreciation of the work of two of the artists, but show that twenty years ago the book was prized as highly as we prize it to-day. He says: 'We have thought the illustrations sufficiently interesting to demand a separate notice for themselves, the more so as in many cases they are totally unconnected with Mr. Thornbury's poems.... We are heartily glad to have collected for us some of the most typical illustrations of a school that is, above all others, most characteristic of our latest development in civilisation, and of which the principal members have died in their youth, and have failed to fulfil the greatness of their promise.

'The artists represented are mainly those who immediately followed the so-called pre-Raphaelites, the young men who took up many of their principles, and carried them out in a more modern and a more quiet way than their more ambitious masters. Mr. Sandys, who pinned all his early faith to Holbein, and Messrs. Walker, Pinwell, Lawless, and Houghton, who promised to form a group of brother artists unrivalled in delicacy and originality of sentiment, are here in their earliest and strongest development.... M. J. Lawless contributes no less than twenty designs to the volume. We have examined these singular and beautiful drawings, most of them old favourites, with peculiar emotion. The present writer [Mr. Edmund Gosse] confesses to quite absurd affection for all the few relics of this gifted lad, whose early death seems to have deprived his great genius of all hope of fame. Years ago these illustrations, by an unknown artist, keenly excited a curiosity which was not to be satisfied till we learned, with a sense of actual bereavement, that their author was dead. He seems to have scarcely lived to develop a final manner; with the excessive facility of a boy of high talent we find him incessantly imitating his elder rivals, but always with a difference.... No doubt, in M. J. Lawless, English art sustained one of the sharpest losses it ever had to mourn.

W. HOLMAN HUNT

WILLMOTT'S 'SACRED
POETRY,' 1862

THE LENT
JEWELS

J. LAWSON