With such examples before them of the evil of yielding to the demands of ignorance, and lowering in any way one’s standard of practice before a popular cry, the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, whose first word in art sounded, as Ruskin said, the note of resistance and defiance, did not scruple to make merry over the weaknesses of a school of painting founded on Sir Joshua Reynold’s “Discourses.” Mr. Madox Brown tells us how Rossetti loved to quote from the diary of B.R. Haydon:—“Locked my door and dashed at my picture with a brush dripping with asphaltum.” But of Rossetti’s cordial admiration for Haydon’s genius a contrasting anecdote is evidence:—A friend, discussing with him the relative merits of Haydon and Wilkie, contended that the head of Lazarus was the only fine thing Haydon ever produced. “Ah!” burst out Rossetti, “but that one head is worth all the puny Wilkie ever produced in his life!” Rossetti’s practice, it may here be said, differed from that of his Pre- Raphaelite comrades in the matter of varnish. The strong impulse towards the fresco-method, which was initiated in him, in his student days, by Madox Brown and the Westminster Cartoon competitions, resulted in his avoidance, throughout the best years of his work, of glaze and sheen in painting. From the first, Rossetti hated varnish: hence were developed the fresco-like, pure, and lustreless depths of colour which mark his finest technical level. But his entire confidence in the “Old Master,” Time, to enhance and vindicate his rich green glories in drapery and background is sufficiently attested by his unhesitating and masterly use of green in nearly all his greatest pictures. Not even the verdant gorgeousness of “Ferdinand and Ariel” can compare with the deep, chastened splendour of the green in “Beata Beatrix” and “Mnemosyne,” or in “The Beloved,” “Veronica Veronese,” “La Ghirlandata,” “The Blue Bower,” or, more daring still, in the wonderful series of water-colours which occupy the transition period of Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite work. ----- Footnote 3: “On Pantheism and Cosmic Emotion.” Footnote 4: “The Magazine of Art,” 1888. CHAPTER IV. PERIOD OF TRANSITION. Influence of Browning and Tennyson—Comparison of Rossetti and Browning— Influence of Dante—Introduction to Miss Siddal—Rossetti’s Water- colours—Madox Brown and Romantic Realism—The Dispersal of the Brotherhood—Departure of Woolner—Ideals of Portraiture—Rossetti and Public Exhibitions—Death of Deverell—Rossetti’s Friendship with Ruskin—Apostasy of Millais—The Rank and File of the Movement— Relation to Foreign Schools.