It is but an arbitrary classification that divides the so-called “religious” art of the Pre-Raphaelites from their portrayals of that half historic, half legendary wonder-world we vaguely called “romance.” Rossetti, it has been rightly said, “was a pilgrim who had got out of the region of shrines, but who at every cross-like thing knelt down by the force of thought and muscle.”[9] Above all other qualities of Pre- Raphaelite painting, it is the instinctive perception of “cross-like things” that gives nobility and tenderness to the work of Rossetti and his colleagues. By the light of that inward vision do they choose and transfigure every theme. The haunting sense of the mysteries of existence, of the immanence of the supernatural in the natural sphere, and of the divine possibilities of human nature; the apprehension of the moral law, of sacrifice, reward and penalty, and of the consummation of earth’s good and evil in an immortal realm;—these abide with the painters when they pass from the holy ground of Judea and Galilee to the Pagan splendours of the Hellenic age, the later glories of mediævalism, and the hard prose conditions of modern life. The same great drama of humanity is set before us, but on another stage, with other players. The ideas which dominate the minds of the artists, the principles by which they interpret alike the history of Jerusalem and the problems of London, are of universal application. A classic myth to them is as rich in meaning as a Christian parable; a legend of chivalrous manliness or heroic womanhood as sacred as if written in a canonical gospel. Holman Hunt’s “Awakening Conscience” and “Claudio and Isabella” are as profoundly religious as “Mary Magdalene at the Door;” Rossetti’s “Lady of Pity” and “Beata Beatrix” glow with a spiritual fervour as pure as that of “Ecce Ancilla Domini;” the lessons of Burne-Jones’s “Merciful Knight” and of Millais’s “Hugenot” are as clear as any that “The Light of the World” can teach us;—and this, not that the painters have secularized the highest things, but that they have sanctified the lower; have pierced to the common sources of religious thought and feeling, and have brought into the labour of the present hour the wide and eternal meanings of the past.