Such were a few of the personalities that gathered between 1848 and 1858 around the three prime movers in the Pre-Raphaelite revolt. To claim them as merely, or chiefly, satellites drawn into the orbit of genius, or as forming a distinct and coherent school, would be both foolish and unjust. To attempt an estimate of their relative merit independent of, or in proportion to, the artistic work of the Brotherhood, would be no less invidious than unprofitable. The glory of Pre-Raphaelitism was that it gave the utmost play to individual methods, and even idiosyncrasies,— nay, that its very first principle was “each for himself”—painting his own impressions, his own ideals—and no imitation of one artist by another. Its primary insistence lay on the watchword of all Protestantism—the authority of the individual conscience as against that of a class or a system, and the immediate access for every soul to the source of its highest inspiration. Therefore the “diversities of gifts” which flourished and increased under the sway of the Pre-Raphaelite spirit were the best evidence of that spirit’s quickening power. “A man will always emphasize,” says Mr. P.G. Hamerton, writing on the ultimate effects of the movement, “those truths about art which most strongly recommend themselves to his own peculiar personal temperament. This comes from the vastness of art and the variety of human organizations. For art is so immense a study that no one man ever knew the whole truth about it.” In other words, all the Pre-Raphaelite painters in any sense worthy of the name are intensely individual in quality, and cannot be classed, arranged, or compared together in the order of a system or a school. Each artist must make his original and distinctive contribution to the sum-total of artistic truth; must paint the single aspect, or the most familiar aspect, of the life around him which presents itself to his mind. The more honest he is, and the more true to his own observations and convictions, the more inevitably will he see the world through his own spectacles—well for his superficial happiness, at all events, if they be rose-coloured, and not of a more sombre hue. “We all,” says another art-critic,[5] “have a sense of some particular colour, and because we can paint this colour best we do so at all times and in all places. This may be unconscious on our part—this predilection for a particular colour; but we all unconsciously blab the fact to others; we talk in our dream of art, and tell all our secrets. Old David Cox, when out sketching with his pupils, would go behind them while at work and say to one, ‘Ah, you see green;’ to another, ‘You see purple,’ ‘You see red,’ ‘You see yellow.’ So it is with the colour vision of many who are called Masters. We can identify almost any landscape of our more prominent painters by their special idiosyncrasy of colouring, such as Cuyp with his evening yellows, Linnell with his autumnal browns, or Danby with his sanguinary sunsets.