but only the accessory, of the painting. Undoubtedly the new note struck in 1849 was, as Ruskin says, a note of resistance and defiance. But the revolutionary impulse had yet to be developed on reconstructive lines; and this development, though powerfully stimulated by the independent genius of Millais in the first four years of the Brotherhood, passed ultimately into the hands of Rossetti and Holman Hunt. But Ruskin’s championship of Hunt and Millais when the powers of orthodoxy were against them and their friends were few, and his no less generous patronage of Rossetti in the succeeding years, did much to turn the current of critical favour in the direction of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal. Hunt’s picture, “Valentine and Sylvia,” after its merciless ordeal of ridicule and abuse in London, was rewarded by a £50 prize at the Academy of Liverpool,—the first English city to give public recognition and support to the rising school. The story of the steadfast encouragement accorded to the Pre-Raphaelites by the Liverpool Academy during the next six years, in which the annual prize of £50 was granted in every instance to pictures either by Millais, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, or a painter of kindred aims—Mark Anthony,—and of the dissensions which arose in and round the Academic Council when in 1857 the prize was once more won by Millais, affords an interesting side light upon the artistic controversy of the period. A leading literary newspaper attacked the Liverpool Academy in the bitterest terms for what it called “the Pre-Raphaelite heresy,” and Mr. Ruskin again came forward in the press to the defence of the painters. In the following year another nomination of Madox Brown by the Council for the award in question brought the strife to a crisis; the Town Council withdrew its financial support from the Academy, and rival exhibitions were opened, resulting in failure on both sides. Time, however, worked a significant revenge. Not long after the press attack upon the Academy Council, one of the original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. F.G. Stephens, was appointed art-critic of the very journal that had so violently forsworn “the Pre-Raphaelite heresy.” Twenty years later, the finest English art gallery outside London was erected in Liverpool through the munificence of Mr. (afterwards Sir) A.B. Walker, recently deceased; and yielded some of the most important spaces on its walls to pictures of the highest level of the English Pre-Raphaelite school.