We are glad to learn that a constantly increasing subscription-list, both at home and abroad, shows, not only that Mr. Runkle judged wisely in thinking such a journal needed, but also that the editorial office has fallen upon the right man.

Memoir and Letters of the late Thomas Seddon, Artist, By his BROTHER.  London:  1858.

Associations are fast gathering round the English Pre-Raphaelites.  Those that come with honors and with death already belong to them.  A permanent influence is assured to the new school by a continuance of vigor, and by the space which it already occupies in the history of Art.  This little volume is of interest as being the first of its biographies.  Mr. Seddon attained no wide reputation during his life, but he left a few pictures of enduring value; and his early death was felt, by those who best knew his powers and purposes, to be a great loss to Art.

He was the son of a cabinet-manufacturer, and was born in London in 1821.  After receiving a good school-education, at the age of sixteen he entered his father’s work-rooms.  He had already shown a decided love of drawing.  He had a quick perception of beauty, and excellent power of observation.  His disposition was serious, and his conscience sensitive; but he had a pleasant vein of humor, and a generous nature.  After some years of irksome work, he was sent to Paris to perfect himself in the arts of ornamentation, and his residence there seems to have confirmed his taste for painting, to the practice of which he desired to devote his life.  But for the next ten years he was engaged in business, giving, however, his evenings and his few vacations to the study and practice of Art, and becoming more and more eager to leave an employment which was wholly uncongenial to him.  At length, in his thirtieth year, he was able to begin his career as a professional artist.  His experiences at first differed but little from those of the common run of young painters; but his fidelity in work, his conscientious rendering of the details of Nature, and his sincerity of purpose, gave real worth even to his earlier pictures, and brought him into relations of cordial friendship with Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, and others of the heads of Pre-Raphaelitism.  After making a long visit, in company with Hunt, for the purposes of study, to Egypt and Palestine, and painting a few remarkable pictures, he returned home, and was married.  Some months afterward he set out again for the East, but had hardly reached Cairo before he was seized with fatal illness.  He died on the 23d of November, 1856,—­just as he was grasping the fruit of years of labor and waiting.