'Of Pinwell no need to say so much. He has lived, not long enough indeed to fulfil the great promise of his youth, but to ensure his head a lasting laurel. There have been stronger intellects, purer colourists, surer draughtsmen among his contemporaries, but where shall we seek a spirit of poetry more pathetic, more subtle, more absolutely modern than his? The critics are for ever urging poets and painters to cultivate the materials that lie about them in the common household-life of to-day. It is not so easy to do so; it is not to be done by writing "idylls of the gutter and the gibbet"; it is not to be done by painting the working-man asleep by his baby's cradle. Perhaps no one has done it with so deep and thorough a sympathy as Pinwell; and it is sympathy that is needed, not curiosity or pity.' But it would be hardly fair to quote further from Mr. Gosse's appreciation twenty years ago of artists still living. The volume contains eight designs by Sandys, namely, _Labours of Thor_ (_Harold Harfagr_), _King Warwolf_, _The Apparitor of the Secret Tribunal_ (_Jacques de Caumont_), _Tintoretto_ (_Yet once more on the organ play_), _The Avatar of Zeus_ (_The King at the Gate_), _The search of Ceres for Proserpine_ (_Helen and Cassandra_), _The Boy Martyr_, _The Three Statues of Egina_, and _The Miller's Meadow_ (_The Old Chartist_); the alternative title given in brackets is that of the original as it first appeared in _Once a Week_. To show how carelessly the author treated the artists, to whom, in a flowery preface, he says he owes so much, 'for they have given to his airy nothings a local habitation and a name, and have caught and fixed down on paper, like butterflies in an entomologist's cabinet, many a fleeting Cynthia of his brain,' it will suffice to quote his profuse acknowledgments to 'Mr. Poynter, an old schoolfellow of the author's, and now Professor in the London University, [who] has expended all his learning, taste, and thought in the _The Three Statues_. The drapery might be copied by a sculptor, it is arrayed with such fine artistic feeling, and over the whole the artist has thrown the solemnity of the subject, and has shown, in Pluto's overshadowing arm, the vanity of all things under the sun--even the pure ambition of a great artist.' This charming eulogy, be it noted, is bestowed on a drawing that is by Frederick Sandys!!! not by Poynter, who is unrepresented in the book.