mong the number. In 1856 he
contributed many of the same poems, together with others, to _The Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine_, of which Canon Dixon has kindly undertaken to
tell the history. He says:

My knowledge of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was begun in connection with _The
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, a monthly periodical, which was started
in January 1856, and lasted a year. The projectors of this periodical
were Mr. William Morris, Mr. Ed. Burne Jones, and myself. The editor was
Mr. (now the Rev.) William Fulford. Among the original contributors were
the late Mr. Wilfred Heeley of Cambridge, Mr. Faulkner, now Fellow
of University College, Oxford, and Mr. Cormel Price. We were all
undergraduates. The publishers of the magazine were the late firm of
Bell and Daldy. We gradually associated with ourselves several other
contributors: above all, D. G. Rossetti.

Of this undertaking the central notion was, I think, to advocate moral
earnestness and purpose in literature, art, and society. It was founded
much on Mr. Ruskin's teaching: it sprang out of youthful impatience, and
exhibited many signs of immaturity and ignorance: but perhaps it was
not without value as a protest against some things. The pre-Raphaelite
movement was then in vigour: and this Magazine came to be considered as
the organ of those who accepted the ideas which were brought into art
at that time; and, as in a manner, the successor of _The Germ_, a small
periodical which had been published previously by the first beginners
of the movement. Rossetti, in many respects the most memorable of the
pre-Raphaelites, became connected with our Magazine when it had been
in existence about six months: and he contributed to it several of the
finest of the poems that were afterwards collected in the former of
his two volumes of poems: namely, _The Burden of Nineveh, The Blessed
Damozel, and The Staff and Scrip_. I think that one of them, _The
Blessed Damozel_, had appeared previously in _The Germ_. All these
poems, as they now stand in the author's volume, have been greatly
altered from what they were in the Magazine: and, in being altered, not
always improved, at least in the verbal changes. The first of them, a
sublime meditation of peculiar metrical power, has been much altered,
and in general happily, as to the arrangement of stanzas: but not always
so happily as to the words. It is, however, pleasing to notice that in
the alterations some touches of bitterness ha