Christina Rossetti is, we believe, the queen of the Preraphaelite school, the literary department of that school at least, in England. To those interested in Preraphaelites and Preraphaelitism the present volume, which seems to be the first American edition of this lady’s poems, will prove a great attraction. The school in art and literature represented under this name, however, has as yet made small progress among ourselves. It will doubtless be attributed to our barbarism, but that is an accusation to which we are growing accustomed, and which we can very complacently bear. The members of the school we know: Ruskin, Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, all the other Rossettis, Swinburne, Morris, and the rest; but we know no school. It has not yet won enough pupils to establish itself among us, and we at best regard it as a fashion that will pass away as have so many others: the low shirt-collar, flowing locks, melancholy visage, and aspect of general disgust with which, for instance, the imitators of Byron, in all save his intellect, were wont to afflict us in the earlier portion of the present century. The fact is, our English friends have a way of running into these fashions that is perplexing, and that would seem to indicate an inability on their part to judge for themselves of literary or artistic merit. To-day Pope and Addison are the fashion; to-morrow, Byron and Jeffreys; then Wordsworth and Carlyle; then Tennyson and Macaulay; and now Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, and their kin, if they are not in the ascendant, gain a school, succeed in making a great deal of noise about themselves, and in having a great deal of noise made about them. It is the same with tailoring in days when your tailor, like your cook, is an “artist.” Surely the laws and canons of art are constant. The good is good and the bad bad, by whomsoever written or wrought. Affectation cannot cover poverty of thought or conception. A return to old ways, old models, old methods, is good, provided we go deeper than the mere fringe and trappings of such. How the name Preraphaelite first came we do not know. It originated, we believe, in an earnest revolt against certain viciousness in modern art. It was, if we mistake not, a return, to a great extent, to old-time realism. The question is, How far back did the originators of the movement go? If we take the strict meaning of the word, Homer was a Preraphaelite; so was Virgil; so was Horace; so were the Greek tragedians; so was Aristophanes. Apelles’ brush deceived the birds of heaven; Phidias made the marble live ages before Raphael. Nay, how long before Raphael did the inspired prophets catch the very breathings of God to men, and turn them into the music and the religion of all time? These are surely Preraphaelites; yet we find few signs of their teachings in this fussy, ardent, and aggressive little modern English school.