principles, and became the most successful and popular of British artists in genre.  In natural talent and cleverness of execution he was the most brilliant of the three; in imaginative intensity and originality he was Rossetti’s inferior—­as in patience and religious earnestness he was inferior to Hunt.  It was Hunt who stuck most faithfully to the programme of Pre-Raphaelitism.  He spent laborious years in the East in order to secure the exactest local truth of scenery and costume for his Biblical pieces:  “Christ in the Shadow of Death,” “Christ in the Temple,” and “The Scapegoat.”  While executing the last-named, he pitched his tent on the shores of the Dead Sea and painted the desert landscape and the actual goat from a model tied down on the edge of the sea.  Hunt’s “Light of the World” was one of the masterpieces of the school, and as it is typical in many ways, may repay description.  Ruskin pronounced it “the most perfect instance of expressional purpose with technical power which the world has yet produced.”

In this tall, narrow canvas the figure of Christ occupies nearly half the space.  He holds a lantern in his hand and knocks at a cottage door.  The face—­said to be a portrait of Venables, curate of St. Paul’s, Oxford—­is quite unlike the type which Raphael has made traditional.  It is masculine—­even rugged—­seamed with lines of care, and filled with an expression of yearning.  There is anxiety and almost timidity in his pose as he listens for an answer to his knock.  The nails and bolts of the door are rusted; it is overgrown with ivy and the tall stalks and flat umbels of fennel.  The sill is choked with nettles and other weeds, emblems all of the long sleep of the world which Christ comes to break.  The full moon makes a halo behind his head and shines through the low boughs of an orchard, whose apples strew the dark grass in the foreground, sown with spots of light from the star-shaped perforations in the lantern-cover.  They are the apples of Eden, emblems of the Fall.  Everything, in fact, is symbolical.  Christ’s seamless white robe, with its single heavy fold, typifies the Church catholic; the jewelled clasps of the priestly mantle, one square and one oval, are the Old and New Testaments.  The golden crown is enwoven with one of thorns, from which new leaves are sprouting.  The richly embroidered mantle hem has its meaning, and so have the figures on the lantern.  To get the light in this picture right, Hunt painted out of doors in an orchard every moonlight night for three months from nine o’clock till five.  While working in his studio, he darkened one end of the room, put a lantern in the hand of his lay-figure and painted this interior through the hole in a curtain.  On moonlight nights he let the moon shine in through the window to mix with the lantern light.  It was a principle with the Brotherhood that detail, though not introduced for its own sake, should be painted with truth to nature.  Hunt,