h, and the oil. 'I
cannot gather the beams out of the east, or I would make _them_ tell you
what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this, and let us remember
together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the night sky, or I would
make that teach you what I have seen; but read this, interpret this, and
let us feel together. And if you have not that within you which I can
summon to my aid, if you have not the sun in your spirit, and the
passion in your heart, which my words may awaken, though they be
indistinct and swift, leave me; for I will give you no patient mockery,
no laborious insult of that glorious Nature, whose I am and whom I
serve. Let other servants imitate the voice and the gesture of their
master, while they forget his message. Hear that message from me; but
remember that the teaching of Divine truth must still be a mystery.'"

Within a very few years Ruskin was performing a more useful service for
the English School of painting than that of gilding the fine gold of its
greatest genius. Whether or not he was aware of the fact, young Holman
Hunt had borrowed a copy of "Modern Painters," which, he says, entirely
changed his opinions as to the views held by society at large concerning
art, and in 1849 there were exhibited Hunt's _Rienzi_, Rossetti's
_Girlhood of Mary Virgin_, and Millais' _Lorenzo and Isabella_, each
inscribed with the mystic letters "P.R.B.," meaning "Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood." It is interesting to note that this alliance was formed
when the three young artists were looking over a book of engravings of
the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

In the following year Hunt exhibited the _British Family_, Millais, _The
Carpenter's Shop_, and Rossetti the _Ecce Ancilla Domini_, and in 1851
were Hunt's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and three by Millais. The fury of
the critics had now reached a point at which some notice had to be taken
of it--as of a man in an apopleptic fit. That of the Times in
particular:--"These young artists have unfortunately become notorious by
addicting themselves to an antiquated style, false perspective, and
crude colour of remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed
drapery "snapped instead of folded," faces bloated into apoplexy, or
extenuated into skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's
shop, and expression forced into caricature. That morbid infatuation
which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity
deserves n