lowing manes, rising and leaping in the crest of the wave.

His portraits of great men generally took the form of half-lengths with
the simplest backgrounds. His subjects were of all kinds--Tennyson and
Browning, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, Gladstone, Mill, Motley, Joachim,
Thiers, and Anthony Panizzi.[34] His object was a national one, and the
foreigners admitted to the company were usually closely connected with
England. Sometimes the pose of the body and the hands helps the
conception, as in Lord Lytton and Cardinal Manning; more often Watts
trusts to the simple mass of the head or to the character revealed by
the features in repose. No finer examples for contrast can be given than
the portraits of the two friends, Burne-Jones and William Morris,
painted in 1870. In the former we see the spirit of the dreamer, in the
latter the splendid vitality and force of the craftsman, who was
impetuous in action as he was rich in invention. The room at the
National Portrait Gallery where this collection is hung speaks
eloquently to us of the Victorian Age and the varied genius of its
greatest men; and in some cases we have the additional interest of being
able to compare portraits of the same men painted by Watts and by other
artists. Well known is the contrast in the case of Carlyle. Millais has
painted a picturesque old man whose talk might be racy and his temper
uncertain; but the soul of the seer, tormented by conflicts and yet
clinging to an inner faith, is revealed only by the hands of Watts.
Again Millais gives us the noble features, the extravagant 'hure'[35] of
the Tennyson whom his contemporaries saw, alive, glowing with force;
Watts has exalted this conception to a higher level and has portrayed
the thinker whom the world will honour many centuries hence. Some will
perhaps prefer the more objective treatment; and it is certain that
Watts's ambition led him into difficult paths. Striving to represent the
soul of his sitter, he was conscious at times that he failed--that he
could not see or realize what he was searching for. More than once he
abandoned a commission when he felt this uncertainty in himself. But
when the accord between artist and sitter was perfect, he achieved a
triumph of idealization, combined with a firm grasp on reality, such as
few artists since Giorgione and the young Titian have been able to
achieve.

[Note 34: Sir Anthony Panizzi, an Italian political refugee, the
most famous of librarians. He ser