There were in the late summer of 1848, in the Schools of the Royal Academy or barely emergent from them, four young men to whom this condition of the art seemed offensive, contemptible, and even scandalous.  Their names were William Holman-Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painters, and Thomas Woolner, sculptor.  Their ages varied from twenty-two to nineteen—­Woolner being the eldest, and Millais the youngest.  Being little more than lads, these young men were naturally not very deep in either the theory or the practice of art:  but they had open eyes and minds, and could discern that some things were good and other bad—­that some things they liked, and others they hated.  They hated the lack of ideas in art, and the lack of character; the silliness and vacuity which belong to the one, the flimsiness and make-believe which result from the other.  They hated those forms of execution which are merely smooth and prettyish, and those which, pretending to mastery, are nothing better than slovenly and slapdash, or what the P.R.B.’s called “sloshy.”  Still more did they hate the notion that each artist should not obey his own individual impulse, act upon his own perception and study of Nature, and scrutinize and work at his objective material with assiduity before he could attempt to display and interpret it; but that, instead of all this, he should try to be “like somebody else,” imitating some extant style and manner, and applying the cut-and-dry rules enunciated by A from the practice of B or C. They determined to do the exact contrary.  The temper of these striplings, after some years of the current academic training, was the temper of rebels:  they meant revolt, and produced revolution.  It would be a mistake to suppose, because the called themselves Praeraphaelites, that they seriously disliked the works produced by Raphael; but they disliked the works produced by Raphael’s uninspired satellites, and were resolved to find out, by personal study and practice, what their own several faculties and adaptabilities might be, without being bound by rules and big-wiggeries founded upon the performance of Raphael or of any one.  They were to have no master except their own powers of mind and hand, and their own first-hand study of Nature.  Their minds were to furnish them with subjects for works of art, and with the general scheme of treatment; Nature was to be their one or their paramount storehouse of materials for objects to be represented; the study of her was to be deep, and the representation (at any rate in the earlier stages of self-discipline and work) in the highest degree exact; executive methods were to be learned partly from precept and example, but most essentially from practice and experiment.  As their minds were very different in range and direction, their products also, from the first, differed greatly; and these soon ceased to have any link of resemblance.