hrough it and forgotten it, not well knowing
the degree of harm they had sustained. This sense appeared, among our
youths,--increased,--matured into resolute action. Necessarily, to exist
at all, it needed the support both of strong instincts and of
considerable self-confidence, otherwise it must at once have been borne
down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong
instincts are apt to make men strange, and rude; self-confidence,
however well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance
of impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening
every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of
it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little
ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in
a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly
to be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of
his work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he
should be regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of
the judges trained in the system he was breaking through, and with utter
contempt and reprobation by the envious and the dull. Consider, farther,
that the particular system to be overthrown was, in the present case,
one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the
expense of manliness and truth; and it will seem likely, _a priori_,
that the men intended successfully to resist the influence of such a
system should be endowed with little natural sense of beauty, and thus
rendered dead to the temptation it presented. Summing up these
conditions, there is surely little cause for surprise that pictures
painted, in a temper of resistance, by exceedingly young men, of
stubborn instincts and positive self-trust, and with little natural
perception of beauty, should not be calculated, at the first glance, to
win us from works enriched by plagiarism, polished by convention,
invested with all the attractiveness of artificial grace, and
recommended to our respect by established authority.

We should, however, on the other hand, have anticipated, that in
proportion to the strength of character required for the effort, and to
the absence of distracting sentiments, whether respect for precedent, or
affection for ideal beauty, would be the energy exhibited in the pursuit
of the special objects which the youths proposed to themselves, and
t