Rossetti himself, as we have already seen, produced but very few male portraits. The large oil-painting of his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell, and the pencil drawings of his father and grandfather; the water-colour sketches of Browning and Swinburne, and the admirable life-size chalks of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Theodore Watts (said by Mr. Swinburne to be his masterpiece in portraiture), Mr. F.R. Leyland, Dr. Gordon Hake, Mr. George Hake, and Mr. W.J. Stillman, two or three pencil drawings of Madox Brown, and the painting of Holman Hunt, as above recorded, seem to exhaust the list of his efforts in that field, if we exclude the consideration of many excellent likenesses which occur among his _genre_-pictures. W.M. Rossetti, for instance, sat more than once to his brother for the head of Dante, and many other important figures; in fact, there was a general practice of mutual accommodation among the Brothers in serving as models one to another. Yet the immense influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement upon English portraiture in the latter half of the nineteenth century would be difficult to over-estimate. It must be remembered that the first principle of Pre-Raphaelitism—namely, that nature, including human nature, is to be painted truthfully and unflinchingly as it presents itself to the painter’s eye—strikes directly at the root of the conventional habit, which aimed at “idealizing” the subject into something far superior to the present reality. Still, as “the eye sees what it brings the power to see,” so the rightly-trained artist sees infinitely more than the casual observer, and his purest realism becomes the highest ideality. For in order to represent nature truly, something more is demanded than imitation. Diderot tells a story of a painter well known to him and to fame, who, on beginning work upon a new subject, always went down upon his knees and prayed to be delivered from the model. There was a grain of truth in his notion. To be delivered from the letter in order to apprehend the spirit, yet to follow faithfully the visible in order to attain the invisible, is the task of the portrait-painter. The mistake of the pseudo-classic idealists, as of the impractical folk in other walks of life, is to suppose that by aiming at the spirit they are absolved from the letter altogether; not perceiving that to gain the spirit they must reach _through_ the letter, and _beyond_ it. Every true portrait-painter is an idealist in this highest sense, that he perceives and reproduces the inmost and essential Self of his sitter, and in supreme moments resolves, as Spinoza would have it, the “potential human” into the “actual divine.” He portrays scrupulously the outward aspect, but interprets the whole by that pervading spirit from within to which the outward aspect has given him—as a seer—the key. The face he paints is not transfigured by his own imagination, his own conceit, however fair, of what that face might or ought to be; but it is