Ruskin knew nothing personally of these young innovators, and had not at first sight wholly approved of the apparently Puseyite tendency of Rossetti’s “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” Millais’ “Carpenter’s Shop,” and Holman Hunt’s “Early Christian Missionary,” exhibited the year before.  All these months he had been closely kept to his “Sheepfolds” and “Stones of Venice”; but now he was correcting the proofs of “Modern Painters,” vol. i., as thus: 

“Chapter the last, section 21:  The duty and after privileges of all students....  Go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.”

And at Coventry Patmore’s request he went to the Academy to look at the pictures in question.  Yes; the faces were ugly:  Millais’ “Mariana” was a piece of idolatrous Papistry, and there was a mistake in the perspective.  Collins’ “Convent Thoughts”—­more Popery; but very careful—­“the tadpole too small for its age”; but what studies of plants!  And there was his own “Alisma Plantago,” which he had been drawing for “Stones of Venice” (vol. i., plate 7) and describing:  “The lines through its body, which are of peculiar beauty, mark the different expansions of its fibres, and are, I think, exactly the same as those which would be traced by the currents of a river entering a lake of the shape of the leaf, at the end where the stalk is, and passing out at its point.”  Curvature was one of the special subjects of Ruskin, the one he found most neglected by ordinary artists.  The “Alisma” was a test of observation and draughtsmanship.  He had never seen it so thoroughly or so well drawn, and heartily wished the study were his.

Looking again at the other works of the school, he found that the one mistake in the “Mariana” was the only error in perspective in the whole series of pictures; which could not be said of any twelve works, containing architecture, by popular artists in the exhibition; and that, as studies both of drapery and of every other minor detail, there had been nothing in art so earnest or so complete as these pictures since the days of Albert Duerer.

He went home, and wrote his verdict in a letter to The Times (May 9, 1851).  Next day he asked the price of Hunt’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and Millais’ “Return of the Dove.”  On the 13th his letter appeared in The Times, and on the 26th he wrote again, pointing out beauties, and indications of power in conception, and observation of Nature, and handling, where at first he, like the rest of the public, had been repelled by the wilful ugliness of the faces.  Meanwhile the Pre-Raphaelites wrote to tell him that they were neither Papists nor Puseyites.  The day after his second letter was