It would be impracticable here to follow in detail the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites upon the religious paintings of their contemporaries and successors, or to estimate the exact relation of their work to that of their nearest precursor, Madox Brown. But a single example from the last-named artist, and another from the youngest of the Pre-Raphaelite group, but never numbered with the Brotherhood—Mr. Burne-Jones—may serve to illustrate still further the great religious principles of which these painters steadfastly took hold. “The Entombment” remains among the finest works of Madox Brown, and embodies, in its simple austerity, its direct pathos, a spiritual fervour akin to the highest inspirations of Holman Hunt. The dignity of the human body, the solemnity and awfulness of physical death, the tender charm of child life and child innocence, the mystery of immortality, and the apprehension of a “risen” life,—all these things are brought within the range of thought opened up by that sombre and majestic design. Seldom in modern art has the intense realism of death been so delicately handled, and yet with such uncompromising force. The faces of the women bending over the loved corpse are full of grief and perplexity, yet even in the atmosphere of death there is a subtle breath of triumph and of hope, a sense that the body is not all, that what is left is but the shell, the “house of Life;” the true Life is not dead, but gone—whither? The tender light that plays around the mourners, and the contrast of the vigorous little body of the young child with the aged and shattered frame of the dead martyr, seem to voice the eternal protest of the heart against annihilation, the irrepressible demand of the soul for a future life. Thirty years apart from “The Light of the World” and “Mary in the House of John,” but akin to both in motive and spirit, is “The Tree of Life,” one of the latest and noblest of Mr. Burne-Jones’s paintings. This sombre monochrome, so absolutely original in design, so chastened and restrained in execution, ranks with the highest symbolic work of the Pre-Raphaelites in its grasp of the idea of victory through suffering. For “The Tree of Life” is the Cross. Its roots are in the very foundations of the earth; its branches are fed with the heart’s blood of humanity, and its fruit reaches unto Heaven. The Figure that hangs upon it is brooding in benediction over the whole world; the supreme type of that immortal love which fulfils the divine law of sacrifice; embodying in one great symbol the lesson of all history,— “Knowledge by suffering entereth, And Life is perfected by Death.”