These colours, which are exceptional with external nature, are the rule with them. Not only is this so with regard to colour, but, more or less, we put ourselves, form and feature, into our work, and paint our own character, physical as well as mental, in all we do. Raphael, on being asked where he obtained the type of his Madonna, replied, ‘out of his own head,’ which really meant that he had unconsciously painted his own fair features: and this ideal was what he eternally repeated. So was it with Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Murillo, Rubens, Vandyke—they all portrayed themselves recognizably. There is a picture of Jesus and the twelve Apostles in which the whole thirteen faces are all alike, and every one an identifiable copy of the painter’s own. Of course where the face and form are noble we have the less to object to.” This indeed is the crux of the whole matter. As the man is, so will his work be. To portray one’s very self—and first to have such a self as can dignify the portrayal; to paint faithfully what one sees—and first to see the true and the beautiful in the familiar and the commonplace; to depict the world in which one lives—living in a world apart, noble and fair, full of opportunities, if also of mysteries, with bright horizons, however low the sun; and yet to be ever conscious of wider worlds than the imagination can compass though the heart may yearn over them like the heart of him who said _Homo sum; nihil humana mihi alienum puto_: this is fine art; this is “the vision and the faculty divine.” “Produce great Persons!” cries Browning,—“the rest follows.” Therefore it is safe for those who in any real sense know Rossetti to prophesy, with Mr. Harry Quilter, that “the day will surely come when it will be seen that the essence of what is now known as Pre-Raphaelitism was not the influence of a school or a principle, but simply the influence of one man, and that man Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Personal ascendency, says Emerson, is the only force much worth reckoning with. And if that ascendency, over many who never saw Rossetti on earth, has become an intimate and precious inspiration, a motive-impulse abidingly sacred and high, what must it have been to those who knew him in the flesh?