Nor could the fact be otherwise.  We have noticed the identity of taste between the Chinese and the unawakened Europeans, as pointing to a natural stage in art-development; and if we allot to the new school a position one degree higher than that of Cimabue and Giotto, it is all that can be claimed by artists, who have even attempted to dismiss from their minds a later and nobler experience.  Their rule is—­to have no rule; to copy nature, just as she happens to be before them; to select nothing, reject nothing, subordinate nothing, and thus to have no composition and no chiaro-scuro.  They recognise no inequality, no relationship of objects:  a pin in a lady’s dress, and the nose on the lady’s face, are treated with the same even-handed justice.  The harmony of colours is a mere dream:  let them only be as bright as a stained-glass window, and all is well.

At this moment, there are two specimens of Pre-Raphaelitism to be seen at the Exhibition of the Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.  They are both distinguished, like the philosopher in Andersen’s Drop of Ditchwater, by having no name; but a quotation is appended to each of the numbers in the catalogue, and is to be supposed to indicate, the subject.  No. 9, in the Great Room, has this quatrain from Tennyson—­

    ’She only said:  “My life is dreary—­
      He cometh not!” she said;
    She said:  “I’m aweary, aweary—­
      I would that I were dead."’

In illustration of this awkwardly-constructed stanza, a female, uncomely and ungraceful, is represented as standing in the attitude of a yawn, not indicated by the gaping mouth, but by the contorted person, and arms twisted behind the back.  She is close to a stained-glass window, whose gaudy colours are challenged by her own bright blue dress, the object of the artist throughout appearing to be violent opposition, not harmony.  The picture, with its violent dislocations, both of bones and impressions, conveys the idea of anything but repose, although a mouse on the floor bids us notice, that notwithstanding appearances, the ungainly lady stretches herself in silence.  There cannot well be anything more inelegant and untrue than this piece; yet there is clever painting here and there; and some of the accessories, if taken without reference to the design, in which they are blots, are models of their kind.  The thought belongs to the middle ages; the mechanical touch to the post-Raphaelite era.

The other picture, No. 93, in the same room, is larger and more ambitious.  It represents a carpenter’s workshop, with a mechanic at each end of the long bench; one of these, a half-starved, hideous wretch, with hardly a trace of the human anatomy in his composition; and the other, a respectable and rather sagacious-looking person, with immeasurable legs.  Behind the bench is a frightful old woman, of the lowest class; and before it another, younger, but repulsively ugly and vulgar, examining, in conjunction with the respectable