an extend no toleration to a mere servile
imitation of the cramped style, false perspective, and crude colour of
remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery 'snapped
instead of folded'; faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated into
skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's shop, and
expression forced into caricature.... That morbid infatuation which
sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity
deserves no quarter at the hands of the public."

Ruskin knew nothing personally of these young innovators, and had not at
first sight wholly approved of the apparently Puseyite tendency of
Rossetti's "Ecce Ancilla Domini," Millais' "Carpenter's Shop," and
Holman Hunt's "Early Christian Missionary," exhibited the year before.
All these months he had been closely kept to his "Sheepfolds" and
"Stones of Venice"; but now he was correcting the proofs of "Modern
Painters," vol. i., as thus:

"Chapter the last, section 21: _The duty and after privileges of
all students_.... Go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk
with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but
how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction;
rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing;
believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in
the truth."

And at Coventry Patmore's request he went to the Academy to look at the
pictures in question. Yes; the faces were ugly: Millais' "Mariana" was a
piece of idolatrous Papistry, and there was a mistake in the
perspective. Collins' "Convent Thoughts"--more Popery; but very
careful--"the tadpole too small for its age"; but what studies of
plants! And there was his own "Alisma Plantago," which he had been
drawing for "Stones of Venice" (vol. i., plate 7) and describing: "The
lines through its body, which are of peculiar beauty, mark the different
expansions of its fibres, and are, I think, exactly the same as those
which would be traced by the currents of a river entering a lake of the
shape of the leaf, at the end where the stalk is, and passing out at its
point." Curvature was one of the special subjects of Ruskin, the one he
found most neglected by ordinary artists. The "Alisma" was a test of
observation and draughtsmanship. He had never seen it so thoroughly or
so well drawn, and heartily wished the study were his.

Looking again at the other works of the