The impulse thus given by Ruskin, in the minds of the young painters, towards the larger spiritual life and vision of the Pre-Raphaelite period, was strengthened, as Mr. Holman Hunt has told us, by the almost accidental sight of a book of engravings from the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, which fell into the hands of Rossetti and his friends while spending an evening together at Millais’s house. To such aspirants as they, “crying bitterly unto the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,” the work of the early Italian masters here set forth, though already partially known to them in the National Gallery, opened up a new world to be conquered and explored. In the suggestive rather than successful achievements of Cimabue, Giotto, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, they discerned the wealth of _thought_ to which Ruskin had directed them, though the _language_ was still in the course of adjustment to the meaning within. One cannot but think with a half-amused tenderness of the eager experimentalism of the young schismatics, shaking off from their feet the dust of academic propriety, and wandering back, half in jest, half in earnest, in the buoyant prowess of their youth, to the free fields wherefrom —“the harvest long ago Was reaped and garnered in the ancient barns.” It is a pleasant picture which rises in the memory, of the diverse trio, destined in after years for widely different paths of effort and success, yet welded at first in the glow of a common enthusiasm of revolt. It was impossible that they should perceive, at this early age, that the reaction in which they were united was but a preparing of the way for an artistic reconstruction which would demand from its leaders congruity of ideal as well as community of protest. The principle of non-conformity may embrace almost opposite poles of doctrine and practice, but the positive elements of a faith must possess alike the minds of its prophets if they are to pursue in permanent fellowship the goal at which they aim. As George Eliot has said, “If men are to be welded together in the glow of a transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they will inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.”