Rossetti, however, does not attempt quite so bold a translation of the Biblical narrative into modern form as does Millais when, depicting “Christ in the House of His Parents,” he sets the poor and mean-looking child in the midst of almost wholly English surroundings, in a carpenter’s workshop, looking out upon a landscape of thoroughly English meadow-land;—a literalism of method since adopted with more daring fidelity to local colour in their respective fields by such later realists as Fritz von Uhde and Vassili Verestchagin, and others of the German and neo-French schools, but never pursued to the same length in any later experiment from the studios of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Critics probably will long be divided as to the legitimacy of such a process, and its success must be judged largely by the intention of the painter,—whether he seeks merely to present an historical incident with vividness and force, and employs familiar scenery to emphasize the hard reality of his narrative, and whether he rather aspires to interpret the universal truth beneath the incident, and to illustrate its bearing upon present life; in other words, whether he desires to impress us (for example) with the reality of the sufferings of Christ, or with the problem of human suffering in all ages, of which the sacred story is at once the type and the key. It can scarcely be argued that the latter object does not come within the scope of art. The point at issue, however, seems to be that the sense of anachronism aroused by the presentation of great historical or legendary figures in present-day garb, amid the surroundings of contemporary life, is apt to endanger the solemnity of the theme, and to some extent defeat the object of the painter,—in which case it may be urged that the failure is quite as likely to lie upon the spectator’s side. But the literalism of Millais’s picture is eclipsed by the exhaustive symbolism which he uses in common with his colleagues of the Brotherhood, though never carrying it into the elaborate detail cultivated by Mr. Holman Hunt. The “house” of Christ’s Parents is a wooden shed, strewn with shavings and hung with tools. The young Christ has torn his hand on a nail, and St. Joseph, turning from his bench, holds up the wounded palm, which Mary hastens to bind with a linen cloth. John the Baptist brings water to bathe the hurt before she covers it, and the elder woman bends forward to remove the tools with which the boy, perhaps, has carelessly played. The nail-mark in the palm is an obvious presage of the coming Cross. The rough planks and the half-woven basket convey the idea of unfinished work; and on a ladder overhead broods the ever-present dove. The picture is inscribed from the verse in Zechariah,—“And one shall say unto him, ‘What are these wounds in thine hands?’ Then shall he answer, ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’”