rs. It only _could_ appear in the younger ones, our older men
having become familiarized with the false system, or else having
passed through 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, further, 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.

183. 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
affe