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matter how eagerly and conscientiously he sought to represent the color and line shown him by nature, there was ever a voice speaking through the trees or the clouds, or the faces of men and women, or the eyes of dumb things, telling of the vast, unseen, and unfathomable world that his brush could not paint. In picture after picture this consciousness of the unseen, this feeling for the divine gives a spiritual beauty that Millais rarely touches. Compare the "Order of Release" or "The Rescue" for instance, with "The Lady of Shalott," "The Scapegoat," "The Light of the World," "The Triumph of the Innocents," or a dozen others. Apart altogether from their beauty as paintings pure and simple, there is in them a touch of poetry, a reaching out to a world unseen but none the less real, an effort to do what Filippino Lippi and Botticelli had done and what Andrea del Sarto and Titian had failed to do-make the brush an interpreter of passionate and earnest spiritual yearning, of lofty aspirations, of deep pondering over the mysteries of life. Now this poetic side of life which meant so much to Hunt appealed in a different way, perhaps, but ten times more strongly, to the third member of the Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The actual world meant to Rossetti not the world as the camera photographed it, but the world as his imagination saw it. Yet his visions were to Millais graceful and fanciful inanities. The strong, practical sense of the one refused to see "reality" in dream facts of the other and Millais and even Hunt looked on with a half contemptuous irritation as they saw Rossetti's strange creations taken more and more as types of PreRaphaelitism. The public was wrong, of course, in calling Rossetti the typical Pre-Raphaelite. Yet nothing could have been more natural. What men did was simply to take the most poetic member of a movement whose fundamental strength was in its poetic truth, and infer from his work that Pre-Raphaelitism was based on a love for the mystical and the poetic, instead of being primarily a movement for truth as against conventionality.

Rossetti, as a matter of fact, was as true to the principle of sincerity as Millais, and was no more unintelligible to his Pre-Raphaelite brother than Millais himself was to the art critics of 1848 and 1851. Each saw with his own eyes. So Millais painted, to the great advantage of the world "The Huguenot" and "The Order of Release," while Rossetti painted the spiritual faces with their eyes that saw into infinity, the strange, mystic, unforgettable faces that meant to him life and truth as he saw it. Each painter was true to his vow to paint the truth. But Rossetti's truth somehow struck a deeper chord in the world's heart than did that of his brethren, and thousands whose memories are haunted by his spiritual faces and whose aspirations have been made deeper and more beautiful by his strange visions, look but coldly at the masterpieces of those who stood at his side and fought bravely for the principles of truth in art.

In the spring of 1854 the message of truth and poetry that the Pre-Raphaelites, each in his own way, were earnestly giving to the world, reached a band of young men at Oxford, one of whom was to give that message its most ideal expression. "I was writing in my room," writes Edward Burne-Jones, "when Morris ran in one morning bringing the newly published book [Ruskin's Edinburgh Lectures] with him: so everything was put aside until he read it all through to me. And there we first heard about the Pre-Raphaelites, and there I first saw the name of Rossetti." These two, Burne-Jones and William Morris, were fellow students of Exeter College and bosom friends. Neither dreamed, at that time, of an artistic career, though Burne-Jones had always been fond of drawing and did it well. They were simply earnest, whole-souled, healthyminded men with high ideals and natures keenly sensitive to beauty and truth. Ruskin's eloquent praise of the PreRaphaelites awoke an eager response in their hearts. "For many a day we talked of little else but paintings which we had never seen," and only little by little were they intro

duced, first to the works of Millais, Hunt, and Rossetti, and then at last to the great treasuries of art on the continent. In the summer of 1855 the two friends crossed the Channel, and the Italian paintings of the Louvre aided by the Cathedrals of Beauvais and Rouen completed what the Pre-Raphaelites had begun. Burne-Jones sums it up simply enough. "It was while walking on the quay at Havre at night that we resolved definitely that we would begin a life of art, and put off our decision no longer he should be an architect and I a painter. It was a resolve only needing final conclusion; we were bent on that road for the whole past year, and after that night's talk we never hesitated more. That was the most memorable night of my life."

The resolution so seriously reached was acted upon at once. Before long they managed to meet Rossetti, and their timid reverence for his genius changed into something very like worship, warmed by a close and generous personal friendship. Burne-Jones became a painter, enthusiastically adopting the Pre-Raphaelite ideals as interpreted by Rossetti. Morris became not simply an architect but an apostle of the beautiful and the true in building, in poetry, in decoration, in handiwork of all kinds, and finally in social institutions. Rossetti's influence long dominated both, and yet that is possibly the wrong way to put it. Before they had ever heard of Rossetti they had learned to love and pore over the art and literature of the Middle Ages, until it was this affection for the simplicity, the naïveté, the chivalry, the deep spirit of religious devotion, the picturesque largeness of imagination, the hero worship of the medieval world that had prepared their minds for Pre-Raphaelitism in general and Rossetti in particular. It was this whole combination of influences, then,-Chaucer and Malory, Fra Angelico, and Rouen Cathedral, Carlyle's "Past and Present" and the illuminated manuscripts of the Bodleian, the song of the Nibelungen and the quiet peace of an old cloister, Holman Hunt's deep sincerity and Rossetti's poetic fancy,—

it was the appeal of all these things to minds and hearts that were themselves simple, chivalrous, and true that made Burne-Jones and Morris turn away from the fashion of their day and seize upon things of the older time, things fundamentally true and beautiful, which the anxious, hurrying world had forgotten. The Middle Age of BurneJones was doubtless an idealized one. But it was an idealized medieval world that the nineteenth century needed,— its sincerity, its devotion, its simple-mindedness, its chiv alry; not its brutality, its disease, and its superstition. So in the pictures of Burne-Jones we have not the world of today but the mingled worlds of King Arthur and Fra Angelico, interpreted with the skill of the nineteenth century, a world that Chaucer would have revelled in, portrayed with a wealth of imagination and a glory of color that no English painter had ever dreamed of before.

In the fall of 1859 came the first visit to Italy and thereafter there entered into the work of this lover of the Middle Ages something of the flavor of Mantegna, of the fifteenth century Florentines-especially Botticelli-and the painters of Siena. With each year of growing power, there was less and less evident in his art the influence of Rossetti, more and more that of those Italians who, with the glow of the Renaissance about them painted the ideals of the age that was passing away. To many, indeed, the art of Burne-Jones became too medieval. But the things he loved in the Middle Ages were permanent things after all, albeit expressed in a language not wholly of today. He who demands realism, the representation of life with the fidelity insisted upon by Millais and Hunt in their first enthusiasm, will find the land of Burne-Jones but a fairyland, peopled, in the main, by men and women such as we have never seen save in our dreams. So far had the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelitism conquered its old "return to nature" ideal. "I mean by a picture," said the painter in a letter, "a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever

shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only desire."

Once more we have made our study an introductory one and nothing more. We have only tried to see in brief something of the purpose of this group of high-hearted Englishmen, born into a world that was still convulsed and wrecked with the storms of the new democracy and the industrial revolution, when romanticism, philanthrophy, political and social reform, the problems of empire, and the blundering forward leaps of science were filling men's minds with doubts and conflicts, when the prophetic warnings of Carlyle mingled with the groans of workingmen and the preaching of doctrinaries, and the silver trumpet of Ruskin was calling all men to remember amidst the smoke and confusion that only truth and beauty were Look at Reynolds's "Three Ladies Decorating a Bust of Hymen" and then at "The Star of Bethlehem," painted by Burne-Jones and worked by Morris into glorious tapestry for Exeter College. The contrast is like the contrast between "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and "The Eve of St. Agnes" or "The Scholar Gypsy." So perhaps we shall not be thought wholly wrong if we say that the spirit embodied in the paintings of Watts, Madox Brown, Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and their co-workers is the spirit that has made the Victorian Age of science and empire the age of purest idealism that England has ever known.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: BURNE-JONES AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES.

D. S. McColl's "Nineteenth Century Art," $16. W. E. Henley's "Views and Reviews," Chapter on "Art," $1.00. Kenyon Cox's "Old Masters and New," $1.70. Percy H. Bate's "The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters," $3.00. Newnes Art Library, an English series, includes all the leading English artists; each volume contains over fifty illustrations, $1.15 per volume. The "Masters in Art" series, 20 cents each includes both Rossetti and Burne-Jones; ten illustrations accompany each pamphlet. The Chautauqua Press, Chautauqua, N. Y., can supply any of these books.

REVIEW QUESTIONS.

OXFORDSHIRE: I. What are the Cotswolds? 2. What Shakespearean traditions has this region? 3. What striking features have Chipping Campden and Chipping Norton? 4. What remains of the Druids survive in this region? 5. What fatal event took place at Eve

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