of poorly drawn confused accessories will atone for the absence of the dominant idea that welded all the disturbing elements to a perfect whole. One artist to-day, or at most two, alone show any real effort to rival these designs on their own ground. The rest appear to believe that a coarse line and eccentric composition provide all that is required, given sufficient ignorance of academic draughtsmanship. [Illustration: JOHN GILBERT WILLMOTT'S 'POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY,' 1857 HOHENLINDEN] [Illustration: F. R. PICKERSGILL WILLMOTT'S 'POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY,' 1857 THE WATER NYMPH] Another book of the same year, _The Poets of the Nineteenth Century_, selected and edited by the Rev. Robert Aris Willmott (Routledge, 1857), is in many respects quite as fine as the Tennyson, always excepting the pre-Raphaelite element, which is not however totally absent. For in this quarto volume Millais' _Love_ (p. 137) and _The Dream_ (p. 123) are worthy to be placed beside those just noticed. Ford Madox Brown's _Prisoner of Chillon_ (p. 111) is another masterpiece of its sort. For this we are told the artist spent three days in a dissecting-room (or a mortuary--the accounts differ) to watch the gradual change in a dead body, making most careful studies in colour as well as monochrome all for a foreshortened figure in a block 3-3/4 by 5 inches. This procedure is singularly unlike the rapid inspiration which throws off compositions in black and white to-day. In a recent book received with well-deserved applause, some of the smaller 'decorative designs' were produced at the rate of a dozen in a day. The mere time occupied in production is of little consequence, because we know that the apparently rapid 'sketch' by Phil May may have taken far more time than a decorative drawing, with elaborately minute detail over every inch of its surface; but, other qualities being equal, the one produced with lavish expenditure of care and thought is likely to outlive the trifle tossed off in an hour or two. In the _Poets of the Nineteenth Century_ the hundred engravings by the brothers Dalziel include twenty-one of Birket Foster's exquisite landscapes, all with figures; fourteen by W. Harvey, nine by John Gilbert, six by J. Tenniel, five by J. R. Clayton, eleven by T. Dalziel, seven by J. Godwin, five by E. H. Corbould, two by D. Edwards, five by E. Duncan, seven by J. Godwin, and one each by Arthur Hughes, W. P. Leitch, E. A. Goodall, T. D. Hardy, F. R. Pickersgill, and Harrison Weir--a century of designs not unworthy as a whole to represent the art of the day; although Rossetti and Holman Hunt, who figure so strongly in the Tennyson, are not represented. This year John Gilbert illustrated the _Book of Job_ with fifty designs; _The Proverbs of Solomon_ (Nisbet, 1858), a companion volume, contains twenty drawings.