this figure moving slowly and with decorative convention. All the figures are controlled by such a convention; they are partaking in a high drama. Such a convention as Irving has in the art of acting gives something to the dignity of tragedy. The conventions of Rossetti too are so much in the spirit of high art, they conform so well to the claims of art, that they lend beauty to that power of his of giving to his drawings dramatic perfection. In regard to the particular figure of which we write it is better, faulty as it is, than if it had been redrawn in another mood and given again to the picture. It is to be regretted, of course, that it did not come rightly as it is, but it is less to be regretted than if he had substituted dead perfection for living imperfection, a studied and acquired idea of the pose in place of the instinctive one.

The first illustration for Desdemona's Death Song is simply a rough sketch, but even taken as such it shows how blind or how careless in the matter of form Rossetti at times could be. Here the lower part of the figure is so obviously lacking in proportion that it prevents us accepting an otherwise characteristic drawing as such. Still of Rossetti's best moments is the controlling grace of the bend in the maid's wrist, and the movement of her head as she combs Desdemona's hair. The curtain blown into the room by the wind is one of those touches Rossetti gives everywhere; by insistence on such an incident he makes us live the moments depicted in his pictures—just as we find ourselves in moments of extreme tension watching eagerly something absolutely trivial and making some accident portent with meaning.

In the second and completer study for this picture we find the proportions corrected; thought and after-thoughts have developed the artist's intentions. Desdemona, with her hand hanging thoughtfully, is an improvement on her attitude at first. The maid, however, has lost much of the spontaneity of her original gestures.

Like all those in whose art we find phases of an extraordinary beauty Rossetti could often draw in the most uninspired fashion, presumably where his interest flagged. In the drawing of Hamlet and Ophelia, Ophelia is charming; but it is with difficulty that we are reconciled to the Hamlet; it is difficult even to understand in what position the figure is standing; not that this indefiniteness often matters in art, but here, where everything else is so precise, it provokes dissatisfaction. From Rossetti alone could have come the background with the winding ways parting and meeting rhythmically with steps up to the bridge. Such architecture as this, and all the quaint furniture in his pictures, were designed by himself. From his facile imagination anything might come. Certain objects that were full of associations of old things he returned to often in his drawings, such as old Books of Hours with all the sentiment that many hands had given to them. The niche in the picture containing the Crucifix and the Breviaries is significant of the Religion in Rossetti's art. This was his religion, to think of Divine things by the legends of a romantic Church.

In comparing the study for Christ at the House of Simon the Pharisee with the completed drawing, the question arises whether, with the elaboration that has come into the latter, some of the intensity of the study has escaped; or whether, on the other hand, the subject has gained. The simplicity of the first undoubtedly possesses something which is subsequently lost in elaboration, and yet taking the completed picture and looking into it one finds a lesson in Rossetti's methods. We find that by dwelling upon his subject he has emphasised certain notes, has repeated as it were a refrain, and made more spirited and poetic in rendering the figure of the lover in the foreground. After-thoughts have given every touch that could possibly enrich, and, at the same time concentrate, dramatic motif in this figure. The embroidery on his coat, the flowers in his hair, the hair itself, and the face so mocking and fascinating and sure of itself, is more in the spirit of the subject than the gentler face as it appears in the sketch.

The figure of the Magdalene gains in many ways as completed, and though the distressed loving face and the flowing hair of the sketch are changed, the alteration of the expression on the face from one of intense distress to one of proud determination is very interesting as showing how his subjects grew and changed under his hand. It is wholly to the gain of the picture the different gesture which he has arrived at in the second drawing, where the Magdalene with both hands throws the flowers from her hair. The dramatic quality upon which we have insisted as part of Rossetti's art is nowhere better shown than in the deer quietly eating leaves from the wall, all unconscious that there is acted out beside it the most pathetically beautiful drama of the world. One misses in the finished picture some of the sensitive drawing given in the sketch to the Magdalene's dress. Here, instead, her clothes are as if she were perfectly still; they give no indication of her movements and the stormy action round her. That is the fault of Pre-Raphaelitism—to fritter away the spirit for the sake of the embroidery upon the body's clothes; to lose emphasis in elaboration, to sacrifice a greater beauty for a meaner one.

Certain characteristics that are strongest in Rossetti's art are the outcome of the intensely human course his imagination took. His drawings are of the kind that one can live with long; looking into them often one is always rewarded by finding some new thing, and one's thoughts are ever being arrested by new appreciation of some quaint conceit. The depths of Rossetti's imagination are such in these drawings that we may look into them whilst watching the changes of our own thought.

The best that art has given to us has often come from artists in a quite sub-conscious way. Because Rossetti's genius was so many-sided it is probable that he could explain most of what he did to himself, and if in the picture of which we have been speaking we take such a thing as the alterations between the figures in the background, and as they are shown in the sketch, it will seem apparent that he gave reasons to himself for everything in his compositions, and did not drift into anything by accident in aiming at design. In the sketch the nearest figure pursues the Magdalene beckoning, in the finished drawing her movements are arrested, she and the other figures pause before the door, speechless with cynical amusement and surprise as the Magdalene enters.

You should have wept her yesterday was done as an illustration to one of his sister's poems. It represents the return of the Prince after many delays to find his lady has died, believing him unfaithful. The ugly drawing of the Prince spoils an otherwise beautiful