Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/115

94 a single article were Vernon Lushington, who had now left Cambridge and was studying law at the Temple; his brother Godfrey, recently elected Fellow of Oriel; and Bernard Cracroft, of Trinity College, Cambridge, who, like Vernon Lushington, was studying for the Bar, and afterwards became a statist and jurist of some distinction. He was one of the regular contributors to the Westminster Review under Mill, and the author of "Essays on Reform" and various other politico-social works. To these names, however, must be added that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Three of his best-known poems appeared in the later numbers of the magazine: "The Burden of Nineveh" in August; "The Blessed Damozel" in November; and "The Staff and Scrip" in December. "The Blessed Damozel," a poem which, even more than the others, Rossetti kept perpetually retouching, is here printed with many variant readings, both from its original form in "The Germ" and from the later versions in the successive editions of his published volume of poems. The other two, which also vary materially in text from their later forms, were printed here for the first time.

There is little in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which may not be read, even at this distance of time, with much interest: but except these poems of Rossetti's, Morris's own contributions represent, on the whole, that part of its contents which is of permanent value. "Topsy has got the real grit in him and no mistake. But we shall all go to Heaven. Now I call that rather good, a whole natural history in two sentences." So wrote one of the Brotherhood, in a flash of real insight, when seven numbers of the magazine had appeared. These contributions consist of eight prose tales, five poems, an article on Amiens Cathedral and another on two engravings by Alfred