Monday 17th to Saturday 22nd.--Better than art-news signalizes this week--that, namely, of the arrival of Woolner’s vessel, the Windsor, at Melbourne on the 22nd October last. It is the first we have heard about him since he reached Plymouth on his passage out. The Howitts, whom he had gone to join, with Bernhard Smith and Bateman, had started into the interior of the country only two days before. Thus much is gathered from the shipping news in the _Times_ and Howitt’s letters to his family: from Woolner himself we have yet to wait for news. Another item of information is rather sad. Poor Collinson, our once P.R.B., is said to be on the eve of relinquishing art and entering a Jesuit college[269] as a “working brother,” I am told, whatever that may mean.... Gabriel has been giving the finishing touches to some alterations he has made in his old _Annunciation_ picture, consequent on an offer from McCracken of Belfast to buy it, on Hunt’s recommendation, for the original price, £52. 10s. I have been sitting to him to assist his repainting of the Angel’s head. Friday was to have been a P.R.B. meeting at Stephens’s, but no one attended except myself. Hunt had to take advantage of the moonlight night for his picture of _Christ at the Door_.... The only change in domicile that has taken place since I dropped this journal is that Gabriel and I now have Chambers overlooking the river at Blackfriars Bridge, 14 Chatham Place.... I should not have forgotten to premise that, though both Præraphaelism and Brotherhood are as real as ever, and purpose to continue so, the P.R.B. is not and cannot be so much a matter of social intercourse as it used to be. The P.R.B. meeting is no longer a sacred institution--indeed is, as such, well-nigh disused; which may explain the quasi-non-attendance at Stephens’s. And the solemn code of rules which I find attached to these sheets reads now as almost comic.[270] In fact it has been a proof of what Carlyle says in one of his _Latter-day Pamphlets_, that the formulation of a purpose into speech is destructive to that purpose--for not one of the new rules has been acted on, and the falling off of that aspect of P.R.Bism dates from just about the time when those regulations were passed in conclave. Sunday 23rd to Saturday 29th.--Gabriel finished and sent off the _Annunciation_ picture. It has now lost its familiar name of “The Ancilla,” the mottoes having been altered from Latin to English, to guard against the imputation of “popery.” He is now possessed with the idea of bringing out his translation of the _Vita Nuova_,[271] revised and illustrated. He had intended photographed designs a short time ago, but now again purposes etchings. FOOTNOTES: [148] This pen-and-ink design was quite different from the water-colour which Dante Rossetti afterwards executed of the same subject. The design was sold in 1898 among other works which had remained in the hands of Sir John Millais up to his death.