a brother of the London Charterhouse, where he died on 20 April 1887. The Syncretics Heraud was identified as a leading figure in the "Syncretics", a proto-aesthetic group mocked in Punch and prominent around 1840. After a few years the excitement around their eclectic approach subsided. A biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who initially took a great interest, has called Heraud in particular a "general failure". The group Other Syncretics were Francis Foster Barham, Richard Henry Horne, and John Westland Marston. Barham and Heraud founded the Syncretic Society, or Syncretic Association. It grew out of an earlier group round James Pierrepont Greaves, the "Aesthetic Society" or "Aesthetic Institution", based in Burton Street on the north side of Bloomsbury, with a core of Greaves and a few neighbours. Heraud and Barham took over the Monthly Magazine, and it functioned as the organ of the group in the period 1839 to 1841. Camilla Toulmin gained the impression in 1841, visiting Horne, that there was a group of younger and ambitious men in the Syncretics, besides the better-known names. For example, the Syncretics took up the Festus of Philip James Bailey. Transatlantic ties The group also found kinship with, and encouragement from, the New England transcendentalists. Bronson Alcott corresponded with Greaves. He also sent books to Greaves and Heraud; Greaves sent back books including Heraud's Lecture on Poetic Genius. Approval of the Monthly Magazine was strong from Alcott, Convers Francis and George Ripley. Heraud published one piece from New England in 1839, an oration by Robert Bartlett. It proved a false start, though. Later in the year the transcendentalists founded their own periodical, The Dial, along the same lines. Writing in The Dial in 1842, Emerson in his article English Reformers praised Heraud as an interpreter of Jakob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg; and referenced his papers Foreign Aids to Self Intelligence, which had been announced as a three-volume work. Heraud took Emerson to be a disciple of Carlyle, and was contradicted in The Present. A few years later he was explaining that Swedenborg was to be taken only as an example and inspiration, since the transcendentalist approach was at odds with an established church. It was through the pages of the Monthly Magazine that two notable Swedenborgians, James John Garth Wilkinson and Henry James Sr., came to know each other. Carlyle in fact disapproved of the group around Heraud and Alcott House, Greaves's