... I _have_ read the Chatterton article in the review mentioned. If Watts had done it, it would have been immeasurably better. There seems to me, who am very well up in Chatterton, no point whatever made in the article. Why does no one ever even allude to the two attributed portraits of Chatterton--one belonging to Sir H. Taylor, and the other in the Salford Museum? Both seem to be the same person clearly, and a good find for Chatterton, but not conceivably done from him. Nevertheless, I _suspect_ there may be a sidelong genuineness in them. Chatterton was acquainted with one Alcock, a miniature painter at Bristol, to whom he addressed a poem. Had A. painted C. it would be among the many recorded facts; but it would be singular even if, in C.’s rapid posthumous fame, A. had never been asked to make a reminiscent likeness of him. Prom such likeness by the miniature painter these _portraits might_ derive--both being life-sized oil heads. There is a savour of Keats in them, though a friend, taking up the younger-looking of the two, said it reminded him of Jack Sheppard! And not such a bad Chatterton-compound either! But I begin to think I have said all this before.... Oliver, or “Nolly,” as he was always called, was a sort of spread-eagle likeness of his handsome father, with a conical head like Walter Scott. I must confess to you, that, in this world of books, the only one of his I have read, is _Gabriel Denver_, afterwards reprinted in its original and superior form as _The Black Swan_, but published with the former title in his lifetime. Rossetti formed no such philosophic estimate of Chatterton’s contribution to the romantic movement in English poetry as has been formulated in the essay in Ward’s _Poets_. A critic, in the sense of one possessed of a natural gift of analysis, Rossetti assuredly! was not. No man’s instinct for what is good in poetry was ever swifter or surer than that of Rossetti. You might always distrust your judgment if you found it at variance with his where abstract power and beauty were in question. Sooner or later you would inevitably find yourself gravitating to his view. But here Rossetti’s function as a critic ended. His was at best only the criticism of the creator. Of the gift of ultimate classification he had none, and never claimed to have any, although now and again (as where he says that Chatterton was the day-spring of modern romantic poetry), he seems to give sign of a power of critical synthesis.