I have such a nice letter from Marzials (detained in London it seems for ever so long) that I send it you on. Never mind returning it till you are back again.

By the bye, you know very well that I despise the "fly in the foreground" & never put him there in my life myself. What I spoke of was good taste & good workmanship. Keats (whom you seem to quote as a defaulter proving your case) had both supremely — no faults at all later than Endymion, & those not monstrous. Coleridge was perfect & the real model. Shelley was ungrammatical now & then, through carelessness but never wrong prepensely after Alastor. As for the second & third-rate high-finishers you speak of, I wot not of them. Nothing was ever finished to me that had not backbone & sinew to work on.

The representative young book of our time is Morris's first — his best yet for stirring qualities & certainly this of Marzials (good as much in it is) cannot stand by that or even very near it. The faults in Morris's are only surface work.

I shall hope very much to meet Marzials who must be a brick. I suppose you know that John Marshall has got in as Professor of Anatomy at the R.A. What you tell me of old Hart is much what I supposed. I shall always feel kindly towards him, for I believe he wrote a very encouraging notice of my first picture in Athenæum long & long ago.

I'll copy you a Spring sonnet. By the bye, your old favorite called " Sunset Wings " will be in Athenæum next Saturday. They wrote asking for something & I didn't like to say no though I have come to the conclusion that little things printed here & there deflower one's collected work to little purpose.

P.S. I almost think I have forgotten to say what a shame I think it (but then you know I must) that Miss Boyd's best picture — a phoenix among in female art — should have been rejected. Never mind, she has done a good thing.