clever, was not well-suited to the pages of "The Germ." My attention
had been called to it at an earlier date, when my editorial power was
unmodified, but I then staved it off, and indeed John Tupper himself
did not deem it appropriate. It will be observed that "MS. Society"
is said not to mean "Manuscript Society." I forget what it did
mean--possibly "Medical Student Society." The whole thing is replete
with semi-private _sous-entendus_, and banter at Free Trade, medical
and anatomical matters, etc. The like general remarks apply to No. 4,
"Smoke," by the same writer. It is a rollicking semi-intelligible
chaunt, a forcible thing in its way, proper in the first instance (I
believe) to a sort of club of medical students, Royal Academy
students, and others--highly-seasoned smokers most of them--in which
John Tupper exercised a quasi-privacy, and was called (owing to his
thinness, much over-stated in the poem) "The Spectro-cadaveral King."
No. 5, "Rain," is again by John Tupper, and is the only item in "The
Papers of the MS. Society" which seems, in tone and method, to be
reasonably appropriate for "The Germ."

By Alexander Tupper: No. 2, "Swift's Dunces."

By George I. F. Tupper: No. 3, "Mental Scales." This also, in the
scrappy condition which it here presents, reads rather as a joke than
as a serious proposition: I believe it was meant for the latter.

By John L. Tupper: "Viola and Olivia." The verses are not of much
significance. The etching by Deverell, however defective in
technique, claims more attention, as the Viola was drawn from Miss
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, whom Deverell had observed in a bonnet-shop
some few months before the etching was done, and who in 1860 became
the wife of Dante Rossetti. This face does not give much idea of