crisis: “Sir Isumbras” celebrates mediæval chivalry in common things. The strong self-possession of the fireman in the midst of imminent peril, beset on all sides by heat, smoke, water, and burning brands, not callous or insensible to fear, but superior to it, gives us, as it were, the other side of that perfect knighthood suggested by the simple kindness of “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.” In both these pictures, as indeed in “The Hugenot” and in Hunt’s “Claudio and Isabella,” the impression conveyed is not merely of a momentary heroism of choice or deed, but of the long discipline which must have gone to produce it, and of what all goodness costs to the life and lives behind it. It is in these aspects that the Pre-Raphaelites portray, as we have already contended, not merely action but character; not drama only, but the hidden forces of human struggle and circumstance which give the drama its meaning for all time. But great as are these pictures in thought and emotion, excellent as are most of them in technical quality, they are even surpassed, in the sheer passion of romantic worship, in the purest essence of religious chivalry, by one of the earliest and, technically, crudest paintings of Burne-Jones in what may fairly be called his Rossettian period. “The Merciful Knight” stands apart, in its desperate realism, its mystic exaltation and fervour, its emotional abandonment, from all the ethereal and chastened ideals of his imaginative maturity. It represents a phase of feeling very transitory, for the most part, with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,—a return to the most devout and ascetic mediævalism, untempered by the larger Hellenic spirit which re-awoke in modern romance. And, full charged as it is with the inspiration of Rossetti in drawing and colour, its religious severity links it rather to the manner of Holman Hunt. It tells the story “of a knight who forgave his enemy when he might have destroyed him, and how the image of Christ kissed him, in token that his acts had pleased God.” Low at a wayside shrine bends the Merciful Knight, prostrated by the spiritual struggle between magnanimity and vengeance which he has just passed through. And as he kneels in mingled prayer and thankfulness over his own self-conquest and moral victory, the image of Christ, rudely carved and hanging on a simple cross, bends down, miraculously moved, to kiss his cheek. Rarely if ever have the Pre-Raphaelite painters surpassed in any field the emotional power of this great design. The conflict between loyalty to a cause and charity towards its fallen enemy was for some years a favourite subject with the Pre-Raphaelites of every grade. It yielded the motive, for instance, of Millais’s “Proscribed Royalist,” in which a Puritan lady secretly conveys food to her lover, a Cavalier, who is in hiding in a woodland oak; of W.S. Burton’s “Puritan,” where the austere lady, walking with her lover, takes pity on a dying Cavalier, wounded by