published he received an ill-spelt missive, anonymously abusing them.  This was the sort of thing to interest his love of poetical justice.  He made the acquaintance of several of the Brethren.  “Charley” Collins, as his friends affectionately called him, was the son of a respected R.A., and the brother of Wilkie Collins; himself afterwards the author of a delightful book of travel in France, “A Cruise upon Wheels.”  Millais turned out to be the most gifted, charming and handsome of young artists.  Holman Hunt was already a Ruskin-reader, and a seeker after truth, serious and earnest in his religious nature as in his painting.

The Pre-Raphaelites were not, originally, Ruskin’s pupils, nor was their movement, directly, of his creation.  But it was the outcome of a general tendency which he, more than any man, had helped to set in motion; and it was the fulfilment, though in a way he had not expected, of his wishes.

His attraction to Pre-Raphaelitism was none the less real because it was sudden, and brought about partly by personal influence.  And in re-arranging his art-theory to take them in, he had before his mind rather what he hoped they would become than what they were.  For a time, his influence over them was great; their first three years were their own; their next three years were practically his; and some of them, the weaker brethren, leaned upon him until they lost the command of their own powers.  No artist can afford to use another man’s eyes; still less, another man’s brain and heart.  Ruskin, great as an exponent, was in no sense a master of artists; and if he cheered on the men, who, he believed, were the best of the time, it did not follow that he should be saddled with the responsibility of directing them.

The famous pamphlet on “Pre-Raphaelitism” of August, 1851, showed that the same motives of Sincerity impelled both the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren and Turner and, in a degree, men so different as Prout, old Hunt, and Lewis.  All these were opposed to the Academical School who worked by rule of thumb; and they differed among one another only in differences of physical power and moral aim.  Which was all perfectly true, and much truer than the cheap criticism which could not see beyond superficial differences, or the fossil theories of the old school.  But Pre-Raphaelitism was an unstable compound, liable to explode upon the experimenter, and its component parts to return to their old antithesis of crude naturalism on the one hand, and affectation of piety or poetry or antiquarianism, on the other.  And that their new champion did not then foresee.  All he knew was that, just when he was sadly leaving the scene, Turner gone and night coming on, new lights arose.  It was really far more noteworthy that Millais and Rossetti and Hunt were men of genius, than that the “principles” they tried to illustrate were sound, and that Ruskin divined their power, and generously applauded them.