Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
History
Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
Biography
I believe, were Royal Academy students who were invited down by
Rossetti. Their work was naïve and queer to the last degree. It is
perhaps not fair to say which one of them found so much difficulty in
painting the legs of his figures that he drew an impenetrable covert
of sunflowers right across his picture, and only showed the faces of
his heroes and heroines between the golden disks.
The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which also dates from the year
1856, is a still more notable expression of budding genius than the
dome of the Oxford Union. It was edited by Mr. Godfrey Lushington, all
its articles were anonymous, and it contrived to exist through twelve
consecutive monthly numbers. A complete set is now rare, and the
periodical itself is much less known than befits such a receptacle of
pure literature. It contains three or four of Rossetti's finest poems;
a great many of those extraordinary pieces, steeped in mediæval
coloring, which Mr. William Morris was to collect in 1858 into his
bewitching volume, called "The Defence of Guenevere;" several
delightful prose stories of life in the Middle Ages, also by Mr.
Morris, which, like certain prose romances by Mr. Burne-Jones, have
never been publicly claimed or reprinted by their author; and not a
little else that was as new as it was notable. A little later Mr.
William Morris's first book was dedicated "To my Friend Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Painter," and in 1860 Mr. Swinburne followed with a like
inscription of his first-fruits, his tragic drama of "The
Queen-Mother." Thus in the course of a little more than ten years,
Rossetti had become the centre and sun of a galaxy of talent in poetry
and painting, more brilliant perhaps than any which has ever
acknowledged the beneficent sway of any one Englishman of genius.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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