to this interesting and historic exhibition five or six of those marvellous drawings of which mention has just been made. "Dante's Dream," the famous vision of June 9, 1290, with its counterpart, "The Anniversary of the Dream," in 1291, were the most prominent of these. A "Mary Magdalene" was perhaps the most moving and exciting. This extremely original design showed the Magdalene pursued by her lovers, but turning away from them all to seek Jesus in the house of Simon the Pharisee. The architecture in this drawing was almost childish; the wall of Simon's house is not three inches thick, and there is not room for a grown-up person on the stairs that lead to it; but the tender imagination of the whole, the sweet persuasiveness of Christ, who looks out of a window, the passion of the awakened sinner, who tears the roses out of her hair, the curious novelty of treatment in the heads and draperies, all these combine to make it one of those works, the moral force and directness of which appeal to the heart at once. Perhaps the most brilliant piece of color at the Russell Place Gallery may have been Rossetti's "Blue Closet," a picture which either illustrated or, as I should rather suppose, suggested Mr. Morris's wonderful poem published two years later. The same year that displayed him to the public already surrounded by a brilliant phalanx of painter-friends, discovered him also, to the judicious, as a centre of poetic light and heat. The circumstances connected with Rossetti's visit to Oxford a little earlier than this are too recent, are fresh in the memories of too many living persons of distinction, to be discussed with propriety by one who was not present. But certain facts are public, and may be mentioned. The Oxford Union still shows around the interior of its cupola strange, shadowy frescoes, melting into nothingness, which are the work of six men, of whom Rossetti was the leader. These youths had enjoyed no practical training in that particularly artificial branch of art, mural painting, and yet it seems strange that Rossetti himself, at least, should not have understood that a vehicle, such as yolk of egg mixed with vinegar, was absolutely necessary to tempera, or that it was proper, in fresco-painting, to prepare the walls, and paint in the fresh wet mortar. They used no vehicle, they fixed their colors in no coat of plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the naked brick. The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts are now decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible, however, to ascend the gallery of the Oxford Union and examine the ghostly frescoes that are fading there, without great interest and even emotion. Of the young men who painted there under Gabriel Rossetti's eye, all have become greatly distinguished. Mr. Edward Burne-Jones, Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Spencer Stanhope were undergraduates at Oxford. Mr. Valentine Prinsep and Mr. Arthur Hughes,