the beautiful “Proserpine,” is the sorrow of a goddess over her own infirmity. She has opened the mystic casket which she was bidden to keep sealed, and now she stands helpless before the witness of her deed. The potent spirits are escaping from the box, and she can never undo the mischief she has done. “The whole design,” says Mr. Swinburne, “is among Rossetti’s mightiest in its godlike terror and imperial trouble of beauty, shadowed by the smoke and fiery vapour of winged and fleshless passions crowding from the casket in spires of flame-lit and curling cloud round her fatal face and mourning veil of hair.” “What of the end, Pandora? Was it thine, The deed that set these fiery pinions free? Ah! wherefore did the Olympian consistory In its own likeness make thee half divine? Was it that Juno’s brow might stand a sign For ever, and the mien of Pallas be A deadly thing? And that all men might see In Venus’ eyes the gaze of Proserpine? What of the end? These beat their wings at will, The ill-born things, the good things turned to ill,— Powers of the impassioned hours prohibited. Ay, clench the casket now! Whither they go Thou may’st not dare to think: nor canst thou know If Hope still pent there be alive or dead.”[13] It follows, then, that the earnest apprehension of the spiritual sphere, and of a divine justice and retribution for sin, will give a special power and reality to pictures dealing with a crisis of duty, or a moment of choice between martyrdom and sin. Such a choice, such a responsibility, is the motive of some of the finest work of Millais’s transition period,—“The Hugenot,” “The Proscribed Royalist,” “The Rescue,” and “The Black Brunswicker.” “The Hugenot” is probably the most popular, as it is the most perfect, of the painter’s earlier masterpieces. The story which it tells is explained in its full title: “A Hugenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shield himself from danger by wearing the Roman Catholic badge.” “When the clock of the Palais de Justice shall sound upon the great bell at daybreak” (so ran the order of the Duke of Guise), “then each good Catholic must bind a strip of white linen round his arm, and place a fair white cross in his cap.” A Catholic lady is beseeching her Protestant lover to wear the white scarf which will preserve him from the coming massacre. Her beautiful face is drawn with anxious terror as she tries to bind the kerchief round his arm, but he, embracing her, draws it resolutely away; the mental struggle is not his, but hers; in spite of the tenderness of his face, there is a certain sternness and solemnity in it which tells that nothing will move him from his purpose; that he is ready, and gladly ready, for martyrdom. The girl’s love pleads vainly against his duty and his doom. In “The Black Brunswicker,” which formed the pendant