Rossetti and Millais were thus, in 1854, left alone as practical painters; W.M. Rossetti having been from the first exclusively a _littérateur_, while F.G. Stephens, after having produced in youth some work of high quality on strictly Pre-Raphaelite lines, had by this time adopted the same sphere of energy, especially in the realm of the art- critic. But the phase of doubt and hesitation, of compromise (in no invidious sense) between the first inflexible attitude of revolt and the further impulse of re-construction, which had overtaken the Brotherhood in 1851, was by no means the special ordeal of Rossetti. It came soon afterwards upon Millais with an equal import and significance; as though each must pass, in individual experience, through the several stages of destructive and re-creative energy, first of protest, then of reform, and afterwards of reconciliation and progress, which they had recognized in the history of the past, and which their own work as a whole afforded to the history of the nineteenth century. They had to exemplify, each for himself, the resolute overthrow of partial and degenerate principles, and the pursuit, more or less successful, of a further and perhaps undefined ideal, or the reaction towards that very order against which their own strenuous protest had been set. And it is remarkable that, in the case both of Rossetti and of Millais, the painter should have reached his highest level of excellence in art precisely at the moment when his methods were the most unsettled and his principles the least assured. The most discerning critics now agree in placing the high-water mark of Rossetti’s genius in the midst of this transition period, ranging from 1850 to 1860, or, if the decade may be stretched by a license of etymology, covering the “Beata Beatrix” of 1863. And it is scarcely disputable that the supreme achievements of Millais lie within a narrower space, comprising chiefly the “Hugenot” and “Ophelia” of 1852, “The Order of Release” of 1853, “Autumn Leaves” and “The Blind Girl” of 1856, and “The Eve of St. Agnes” in 1863, which really belongs in conception and spirit to the Keats epoch, if we may so call it, which gave birth to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Just as in the dawn of the Italian Renaissance the point of absolute greatness in art was gained at the momentary coalition of the old forces with the new, when the classic spirit was conquered and absorbed by the spirit of romance, and the romantic spirit still beat tremulously about the new world’s doors, so in the struggle of the modern Pre-Raphaelites to reconcile the new impulse with the heritage of the past, the triumph came in the midst of the conflict rather than after the victory. Just as Leonardo and Michaelangelo gathered up and combined the discordant elements of the strife around them into a noble harmony of art, so did the Pre- Raphaelites attune and interpret the diverse forces of their own