The idea was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's, who was then just twenty-two years old. Thomas Woolner, of the same age, and Holman Hunt and Millais, both somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty, were dragged willingly into the plan. William Michael Rossetti, aged nineteen, was made editor; James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens were added to the four original P. R. B.'s; John Lucas Tupper, Ford Madox Brown, Walter Howell Deverell, William Cave Thomas, John Hancock, and Coventry Patmore were intimately connected with the project; and Christina, then eighteen, offered her poems for publication therein. _The Germ_ was published for four months, and then it died. Like all serious things it could find no immediate audience; like all revolutionary things it was called juvenile and regarded with shyness; and like all original and beautiful things it has managed to stay very much alive. For, in 1899, a limited edition of _The Germ_ in facsimile was brought out, and William Michael Rossetti wrote an extensive introduction for it in which he described minutely the whole glorious undertaking. It is these facsimiles that we have been looking through with such awe, and which tell such an interesting story. Here was a league of "unquiet and ambitious young spirits, bent upon making a fresh start of their own, and a clean sweep of some effete respectabilities." On the night of December 19, 1849, when the first issue of the magazine was impending, they met in Dante Rossetti's studio at 72 Newman Street to discuss a change of title. _The P. R. B. Journal and Thoughts Towards Nature_ (the "extra-peculiar" suggestion of Dante, according to his brother) had been discarded, and Mr. Cave Thomas had drawn up a list of sixty-five possibilities, among them _The Seed_, _The Scroll_, _The Harbinger_, _First Thoughts_, _The Sower_, _The Truth-Seeker_, _The Acorn_, and _The Germ_. The last was decided upon and the first issue came out about the first of January. Seven hundred copies were printed and about two hundred sold. This wasn't encouraging, so the second issue was limited to five hundred; but it sold even less well than the first, and the P. R. B.'s were at the end of their resources. Then the printing-firm came to the rescue and undertook the responsibility of two more numbers. The title was changed to _Art and Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature, conducted principally by Artists_; but "all efforts proved useless.... People would not buy _The Germ_, and would scarcely consent to know of its existence. So the magazine breathed its last, and its obsequies were conducted in the strictest privacy."