heir success in attaining them.

All this has actually been the case, but in a degree which it would have
been impossible to anticipate. That two youths, of the respective ages
of eighteen and twenty, should have conceived for themselves a totally
independent and sincere method of study, and enthusiastically persevered
in it against every kind of dissuasion and opposition, is strange
enough; that in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should
have produced works in many parts not inferior to the best of Albert
Durer, this is perhaps not less strange. But the loudness and
universality of the howl which the common critics of the press have
raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or
encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate
their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do
neither the one nor the other,--these are strangest of all--unimaginable
unless they had been experienced.

And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against them,
in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my second
letter to the Times in the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, I received an
anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person apparently
hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of petty
malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public should
know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit which
is at work against these men--how first roused it is difficult to say,
for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young
artists could have excited an hostility so determined and so
cruel;--hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent.
That of the "absence of perspective" was one of the most curious pieces
of the hue and cry which began with the Times, and died away in feeble
maundering in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the Times--I here
contradict it directly for the second time. There was not a single error
in perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if
otherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt, if
with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one
architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I
never met but with two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to
draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions
and curvatures might be calc