The first organized union of workers imbued with the Pre-Raphaelite ideal, and further knit together by a common enthusiasm for the poetry of Keats, appears to have taken the form of a cyclographic society, in which the dominant spirits—Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt—were soon surrounded by a group of more or less gifted companions and friends. The members were pledged to contribute original drawings in regular succession to a portfolio which was passed round for criticism by their fellows. Rossetti, who liked to rule his little kingdom with an absolute sway, seldom disputed by those who deemed submission to his imperious ways but a small price to pay for his friendship, selected from Keats’s “Isabella” the following series of subjects to exercise the talents of the society:—1. “The Lovers;” 2. “The Brothers” (of Isabella); 3.“Good- bye,” (the parting of Isabella and Lorenzo); 4. “The Vision” (Isabella sees in a dream the murder of her lover by her brother); 5. “The Wood” (Isabella visits the scene of the crime and secretly bears away the head of her lover); 6. “The Pot of Basil” (she buries the head in her flower- pot); 7. “The Brothers discover the Pot;” 8. “Madness of Isabella.” It does not appear that any member executed this exhaustive series of proposed sketches in its entirety. The suggestion of subjects from Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” seems to have been no less barren of results. The only drawings from Rossetti’s hand that remain to us from that portfolio are an illustration of Keats’s “Belle Dame sans Merci;” a study from Coleridge’s “Genevieve,” over which he sat up a whole night, completing it at daybreak, and a sketch of “Gretchen in the Chapel” from Goethe’s “Faust.” The society included Walter Howell Deverell, an artist of rare delicacy and grace, and a man of singular personal charm, destined to play a memorable part in the life-history of Rossetti; F.G. Stephens, an intimate friend of Holman Hunt; Thomas Woolner, a young sculptor whose acquaintance Rossetti had made at the Academy Schools; J.A. Vinter, now well known as a portrait painter; and such lesser though by no means insignificant lights as J.B. Keene, F. Watkins, William Dennis, John Hancock, J.T. Clifton, and N.E. Green. It was evident that among the rising generation of painters, long before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,—even before Hunt or Rossetti had entered definitely upon such art training as they ever had— the revolt against the tyranny of the Academy was already begun, and even those least in sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite idea found themselves drawn towards Rossetti and his friends in a common disaffection with the existing _régime_. Moreover, the success of Millais, who at the age of seventeen had gained the highest academic prize for historical painting, and was already earning well with his book-illustrations in black and white, afforded a valuable connecting- link with a larger circle of critics and sympathizers from whom were