with imitating, with the utmost fidelity, the works of that artist; till at length emancipating himself from tutelage, he went for inspiration to the cartoons of Michael Angelo, to the sculptures of the Medici gardens, and to nature herself.  Vasari makes Michael Angelo the magnus Apollo of Raphael; but Quatremere de Quincy assigns to the latter artist a holier worship.  In a letter from him, which he quotes, respecting his famous picture of the Galatea, Raphael says, that in order to paint a beautiful woman, he must see many, but that, after all, he must work upon a certain ideal image present in his mind.  ’We thus see,’ says the French critic, ’that he really sought after the beautiful which Nature presents to art, but which the imagination of the artist alone can seize, and genius alone realise.’

Raphael was the first of the moderns to idealise beauty, or, in other words, to represent nature in the form she is striving, in her infinite progression, to attain, but which as yet she only indicates here and there in those hints and parts that prophetic genius combines and moulds into a whole.  He softened the harsh outlines, mellowed the glaring colours, and harmonised the awkward proportions of mediaeval art.  With him, a new epoch commenced, adorned by many illustrious names, from Julio Romano, the poet of painters, to Titian, who clipped his pencil in the rainbow.  The Lombard school of Titian was the third of the three first great schools of the Revival, in which taste, emancipated from the darkness of the middle ages, sought inspiration in nature and the Greek sculptures.  What would be thought if a school were to arise three hundred years later, not merely discarding the experience and teachings of the great masters, but claiming by its very name to return into the gulf from which these had been emancipated?  This school of decline has, in fact, made its appearance among the other symptoms of the mediaeval mania, and we now gravely hang up in our exhibitions the productions of the Pre-Raphaelites!  The name at first provoked so much ridicule in England, that their friends were at pains to inform the world, that it was assumed merely for the purpose of intimating their entire separation from the schools of Raphael and his successors, and their exclusive devotion to nature.  The artists of Germany, however, with whom the mania commenced, were less scrupulous.[1] They imitated, purposely, the rudeness of the early painters, and even favourably distinguished the juvenile works of Raphael when he was as yet the mere copyist of Perugino.  It is thus only the reformed schools the Pre-Raphaelists avoid; for Mr Ruskin’s notion, that there were no schools at all before Raphael, is quite too wild for answer.[2] The name, however, is of little consequence.  The nature returned to is obviously, to any one who has eyes in his head, the nature of the middle ages; and if our readers will look again at the quotations we have made above—­which were not taken at random—­they will find, in the words of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Vasari, and William Roscoe, a pretty accurate description of the genius and manner of the Pre-Raphaelites.