have been sent to the workhouse; and some really green grass and
blue flowers, as they actually may any day be seen on an English
common-side.

And finally, let us imagine, if imagination fail us not, the far more
wide and weighty indignation of the public, accustomed always to see its
paintings of marriages elaborated in Christian propriety and splendor;
with a bishop officiating, assisted by a dean and an archdeacon; the
modesty of the bride expressed by a veil of the most expensive
Valenciennes, and the robes of the bridesmaids designed by the
perfectest of Parisian artists, and looped up with stuffed robins or
other such tender rarities;--think with what sense of hitherto
unheard-of impropriety, the British public must have received a picture
of a marriage, in which the bride was only crowned with flowers,--at
which the bridesmaids danced barefoot,--and in which nothing was known,
or even conjecturable, respecting the bridegroom, but his love!

233. Such being the manifestly opponent and agonistic temper of these
three pictures (and admitting, which I will crave the reader to do for
the nonce, their real worth and power to be considerable), it surely
becomes a matter of no little interest to see what spirit it is that
they have in common, which, recognized as revolutionary in the minds of
the young artists themselves, caused them, with more or less of
firmness, to constitute themselves into a society, partly monastic,
partly predicatory, called "Pre-Raphaelite": and also recognized as
such, with indignation, by the public, caused the youthfully didactic
society to be regarded with various degrees of contempt, passing into
anger (as of offended personal dignity), and embittered farther, among
certain classes of persons, even into a kind of instinctive abhorrence.

234. I believe the reader will discover, on reflection, that there is
really only one quite common and sympathetic impulse shown in these
three works, otherwise so distinct in aim and execution. And this
fraternal link he will, if careful in reflection, discover to be an
effort to represent, so far as in these youths lay either the choice or
the power, things as they are, or were, or may be, instead of, according
to the practice of their instructors and the wishes of their public,
things as they are _not_, never were, and never can be: this effort
being founded deeply on a conviction that it is at first better, and
finally more pleasing, for human minds