ined the pre-Raphaelites, mainly, it is said, from dislike of
coterie tendencies.

About 1856, Rossetti, with two or three other young painters,
gratuitously undertook to paint designs on the walls of the Union
Debating Hall at Oxford, and about the time he was engaged upon this
task he made the acquaintance of Mr. William Morris, Mr. Burne Jones,
and Mr. Swinburne, who were undergraduates at the University. Mr.
Burne Jones was intended for a clerical career, but due to Rossett's
intercession Holy Orders were abandoned, to the great gain of English
art. He has more than once generously allowed that he owed much to
Rossetti at the beginning of his career, find regarded him to the last
as leader of the movement with which his own name is now so eminently
and distinctively associated. Together, and with the co-operation of Mr.
William Morris and Canon Dixon, they started and carried on for about a
year a monthly periodical called _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_,
of which Canon Dixon, as one of the projectors, shall presently tell the
history. At a subsequent period Mr. Burne Jones and Rossetti, together
with Mr. Madox Brown and some three others, associated with Mr. Morris
in establishing, from the smallest of all possible beginnings, the
trading firm now so well known as Morris and Co., and they remained
partners in this enterprise down to the year 1874, when a dissolution
took place, leaving the business in the hands of the gentleman
whose name it bore, and whose energy had from the first been mainly
instrumental in securing its success.

It may be said that almost from the outset Rossetti viewed the public
exhibition of pictures as a distracting practice. Except the _Girlhood
of Mary Virgin_, the _Annunciation_ was almost the only picture he
exhibited in London, though three or four water-colour drawings were
at an early period exhibited in Liverpool, and of these, by a curious
coincidence, one was the first study for the _Dante's Dream_, which
was purchased by the corporation of the city within a few months of
the painter's death. To sum up all that remains at this stage to say
of Rossetti as a pictorial artist down to his thirtieth year, we may
describe him (as he liked best to hear himself described) simply as
a poetic painter. If he had a special method, it might be called
a distinct poetic abstraction, together with a choice of mediaeval
subject, and an effort after no less vivid rendering of nature than was