'The artists represented are mainly those who immediately followed the so-called pre-Raphaelites, the young men who took up many of their principles, and carried them out in a more modern and a more quiet way than their more ambitious masters. Mr. Sandys, who pinned all his early faith to Holbein, and Messrs. Walker, Pinwell, Lawless, and Houghton, who promised to form a group of brother artists unrivalled in delicacy and originality of sentiment, are here in their earliest and strongest development.... M. J. Lawless contributes no less than twenty designs to the volume. We have examined these singular and beautiful drawings, most of them old favourites, with peculiar emotion. The present writer [Mr. Edmund Gosse] confesses to quite absurd affection for all the few relics of this gifted lad, whose early death seems to have deprived his great genius of all hope of fame. Years ago these illustrations, by an unknown artist, keenly excited a curiosity which was not to be satisfied till we learned, with a sense of actual bereavement, that their author was dead. He seems to have scarcely lived to develop a final manner; with the excessive facility of a boy of high talent we find him incessantly imitating his elder rivals, but always with a difference.... No doubt, in M. J. Lawless, English art sustained one of the sharpest losses it ever had to mourn. [Illustration: W. HOLMAN HUNT WILLMOTT'S 'SACRED POETRY,' 1862 THE LENT JEWELS] [Illustration: J. LAWSON 'ONCE A WEEK' VOL. II. N. S. p. 127 ARIADNE]