espousal of the fervid band, his letters of defence in the London “Times,” and his discussion in his booklet on “Pre-Raphaelitism.”  Heedless of the outcry, Ruskin pursued his own self-confident course, and by the year 1860 he had completed his “Modern Painters,” and, in spite of objurgation and detraction, had won a great name for himself as a critic and expounder, while expanding himself over almost the whole world of art.

We have said that Pre-Raphaelitism, as a movement in art, was contemporaneously jeered at; while to-day, among superficial or inappreciative students of the period, seriously to mention it or any of its cultured brotherhood is to provoke a smile.  Nevertheless, there was not a little high merit in the movement, which Ruskin was keen-eyed and friendly enough to recognize, while much that is worthy afterwards came out of it in the later work of the more notable of its members as well as in that of their unenrolled associates and the admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite method.  What the movement owed to Ruskin is now frankly conceded, in the lesson the brotherhood took to heart from his counsellings,—­to divest art of conventionality, and to work with scrupulous fidelity and sincerity of purpose.  Nor was contemporary art alone the gainer by the movement; it also had its influence on poetry, though this has been obscured—­so far as any beneficial influence can be traced at all—­by the tendency manifested in some of the more amorous poetic swains of the period, who professed to derive their inspiration from the Brotherhood, to identify themselves with what has been styled the “Fleshly School” of verse.  Of the latter number, Swinburne, in his early “Poems and Ballads,” was perhaps the greatest sinner, though atoned for in part by the lyrical art and ardor of his verse, and much more by the higher qualities and scholarly characteristics of his later dramatic Work.  Nor is Dante Rossetti himself, in some of his poems, free from the same taint, despite the fact of his interesting individuality as the chief inspirer and laborer among the Brotherhood.  Yet the movement owed much to both his brush and his pen of other and nobler, because reverential, work, as those will admit who know “The Blessed Damozel,” “Sister Helen,” and his fine collection of sonnets, “The House of Life,” as well as his famous paintings, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” and his Annunciation picture, “Ecce Ancilla Domini.”  Of the product of other Pre-Raphaelites of note,—­such as Ford Madox Brown, Millais, Morris, Woolner the sculptor, Coventry Patmore, and Holman Hunt,—­much that is commendable as well as finely imaginative came from their hands, and justified Ruskin in his gallant advocacy of the movement, its founders, and their work.