workman—­and with her brow knotted in an awful congeries of wrinkles up to her fiery hair—­the hand of a little boy.  This little boy, though plebeian and red-haired, is not unpleasing:  he has apparently cut his hand while playing with some of the edge-tools lying about the shop; while his brother, a better-figured as well as better-behaved boy, with a hairy apron round him, is making himself useful in carrying a basin of some dark-coloured stuff—­probably carpenter’s glue.  But let us see what the legend attached to the number says:  ’And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands?  Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’—­Zechariah, xiii. 6.  What does this mean?  It means, innocent reader, that the piece we have described in its principal features is the Holy Family of the Pre-Raphaelites!  This is their mode of going to nature, selecting nothing but the mean and repulsive, and rejecting nothing but poetical and religious feeling and common decency.

But if the theory of the Pre-Raphaelites is just as regards painting, it must be just as regards the other departments of taste.  Suppose it applied to musical composition.  Let us throw overboard everything that degrades music to a science, and ‘go to nature,’ as Mr Ruskin counsels, ’rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.’  What would be the result?  The result would be the torture of everybody in the country who had the misfortune to possess a cultivated ear.  And yet the music of that time would not be absolutely disagreeable in itself:  it would merely involve the deprivation of what had become a necessary to the taste; for nature would still inspire simple sounds, connected more or less with the feelings.  Nature, in fact, proceeds in music upon laws that are merely elaborated and carried out by science; while in painting, she offers an endless variety of objects and effects, to be selected, grouped, and made into a picture by the artist.  We all feel this when gazing on natural scenery.  We are actuated by an unconscious eclecticism, and make the composition for ourselves.  To some natural scenes, no skill could impart interest of any kind; others attain to a certain character of the picturesque; while others, again, combine in themselves all the elements of a good picture.  But even with these last, mere imitation will not do.  Nature, as Hazlitt observes, ’has a larger canvas than man’—­a canvas immensely larger; and the artist, since he cannot copy, must select.  The same reasoning applies to figure and group-painting, and its accessories.  Nature rarely forms a perfect group, because it is not her purpose to embody a single expression.  As for small accessorial objects, such as a pin or a leaf, being painted with the same care and accuracy as principal objects, this is a defect in drawing, that argues a singular want of reflection.  In nature, we see distinctly the figure and its more prominent parts, but we see the minute accessorial parts so indistinctly, that sometimes we can scarcely tell what they are.  The precise detailing of these objects, therefore, may have the truth of fact, but it is destitute of the truth of nature.