Millais himself, meanwhile, had made acquaintance with an older and still more earnest student not yet pursuing the Academy curriculum, but for whom the future had in store a place second only to Rossetti’s in the movement which united and inspired them in their youth. William Holman Hunt, indeed, may claim to have been earlier than any of his Pre- Raphaelite brethren upon the field of reform; for in the hard solitude of mercantile life, under the stress of poverty and amid the most uncongenial surroundings, he had already thought out and pursued those methods of direct and veracious artistic expression which were afterwards enforced by Pre-Raphaelite rule. Born in London on the 27th of April, 1828, and destined by his father for commercial life, the lad secured from chance companions some occasional help in the artistic studies which he loved. He took a few lessons from a city portrait- painter, and at last gave up his business career, and threw himself upon his own artistic resources for a livelihood. Admission to the schools of the Royal Academy at that time was by a test as arbitrary and inadequate as the teaching to which it led. Each student was required to produce a drawing from the antique, in chalk or charcoal, laboriously stippled in the conventional style; and in this task the half-trained and inexperienced Hunt very pardonably failed on two successive occasions. It was not until the year 1846 that he was at last admitted as a student, and at almost the same time secured a place on the Academy Exhibition walls, where he was represented by a small picture entitled “Hark!”—a little child holding a watch to her ear. It was in the antique galleries at the British Museum, while toiling forlornly at his trial-drawing among a host of similar candidates, that he came across the more successful but sympathetic and genial Millais. The story of Millais’s friendship with the poor and struggling student somewhat older than himself, and of the generous pecuniary help afforded from his own private resources to Hunt at a moment when the magic portals of Art seemed closed for ever against him, has already been told by Mr. Harry Quilter in his history of those early years.