These men heralded a widespread medieval revival, but all the study in the world could not make them paint like born artists of the fifteenth century.  Yet there are those who think that much of the spirit of beauty, which had dwelt in the soul of Botticelli and his contemporaries, was born again in Rossetti and Burne-Jones.  Their feeling for beauty of form and purity of colour, and their aloofness from the modern world, impart to their work an atmosphere that may remind us of the fifteenth century, though the fifteenth century could never have produced it.

Rossetti and Burne-Jones, indeed, never formally joined the Brotherhood, though they were influenced by its ideals and pursued the same strict fidelity to nature in all the accessories of a picture.  Millais and Holman Hunt, original members of the Brotherhood, painted men and women of the mid-Victorian epoch with every detail of their peaked bonnets and plaid shawls, and were comparatively indifferent to beauty of form and face.  But Rossetti and Burne-Jones created a type of ideal beauty which they employed on their canvases with persistent repetition.  Burne-Jones founded his type upon the angels of Botticelli, and his drapery is like that of the ring of dancers in the sky in our picture of the ‘Nativity.’  You are probably familiar with some of his pictures and perhaps have felt the spell of his pure gem-like colouring and pale, haunting faces.  It was the people of their minds’ eye who sat beside their easels.  Rossetti lived and worked in the romantic mood of a Giorgione, but instead of expressing the atmosphere of his fairy city of Venice, he created one as far as possible removed from his own mid-Victorian surroundings.  His imaginary world was peopled by women with pale faces and luxuriant auburn hair, pondering upon the mysteries of the universe.  Like Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel,’ they look out from the gold bar of heaven with eyes from which the wonder is not yet gone.

One of the best Pre-Raphaelite landscapes is the ‘Strayed Sheep’ of Holman Hunt.  The sheep are wandering over a grass hillside of the vividest green, shot with spring flowers, and every sheep is painted with the detail of the central sheep in Hubert van Eyck’s ’Adoration of the Lamb.’  The colouring is almost as bright and jewel-like as that of the fifteenth-century painters, for one of the theories of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was that grass should be painted as green as the single blade—­not the colour of the whole field seen immersed in light and atmosphere, which can make green grass seem gray or even blue.

In Brett’s ‘Val d’Aosta,’ another Pre-Raphaelite landscape, we look from a hill upon a great expanse of valley with mountains rising behind.  Every field of corn and every grassy meadow is outlined as clearly as it would be upon a map.  Every stick can be counted in the fences between the fields and every tree in the hedge-rows.  When we look at the picture we involuntarily wander over the face of the country.  There is no taking in the view at a glance; we must walk through every field and along every path.