Our readers need not fear that we are about to inflict on them a scientific dissertation.  All we wish to do, is to explain to them a word, with the meaning of which many of them are very imperfectly acquainted, and by the mere explanation, to enable them to determine upon its claims to designate—­not merely a school, but the school of art, destined, if founded in truth and nature, to overturn every other.  This word—­Pre-Raphaelitism—­is taken from the name of one of the Italian masters, and it is necessary, in order to understand the question, to ascertain what were the circumstances and the genius that have thus set him up as a landmark in the history of art.

After the fall of the Western Empire, the fine arts were lost, and their productions literally buried in the wreck.  The minds of the composite nations that arose in Europe had no guide.  Men were left to their own instincts, only faintly aided by the ruins and traditions of degenerate Rome; and each series of countries had its own style of art, framed or adopted by the genius of the people.  During the middle ages, the style most general in Northern Europe was the Gothic; and by that term the whole system of art during the period is popularly known in England.  The state of painting, under the Gothic regime, may be seen in the stained windows of the cathedrals; in which strong outlines and bright colours are laid down without any reference to chiaro-scuro, or the scientific arrangement of light and shadow.  This seems a natural stage in art-development, and at the same moment it was seen in equal perfection in China and Europe.  In the former region, the people are now beginning to advance a step beyond, through their imitation of English pictures; although, but a few years ago, they burst into fits of laughter on seeing the shadow of the nose in a portrait.  In Europe, a gigantic and almost sudden stride was made, towards the close of the fifteenth century, under an influence from which the Chinese were debarred, and the nature of which we shall presently explain.

Let us first, however, just notice, that the charms of gaudy inartistic colouring frequently exercise a powerful sway even over minds familiar with better things; although that sway is always indicative of the decay of intellectual or moral freshness.  Thus, it is remarked by an old Greek author (Dionysius of Halicarnassus), that the perfection to which painting had been brought by Apelles, had degenerated under Augustus; the painters being so much fascinated by the new art of colouring, that they neglected design, and preferred the brilliant or gaudy to the solid, and counterfeit to natural beauty.  What this ‘perfection’ of Apelles was, we cannot now tell; but the probability is, that it existed only in design, and that the union of this with artistic colouring was reserved for the modern masters.