Meanwhile the companion of his student days had entered upon a path of more obscure and arduous toil, in the pursuit of an ideal too exalted to endure compromise with any standards of the merely picturesque, or to lend itself readily to fluent and attractive expression. The work of Holman Hunt, among all the Pre-Raphaelite painters, has remained the most consistent and exclusive in its aims and methods, and the least affected by surrounding influences, either from his comrades or from the critical world. His artistic development has been the most faithful to its origins, and has presented the most unbroken continuity of thought and sentiment in its progress from the first “note of resistance and defiance” to the larger harmony of maturer years. The boundaries of his transition-period are more difficult to define than in the case of Millais and Rossetti; but, at the same time, the pictures that issued from his studio while Rossetti was dabbling in experimental water- colours, and Millais compromising brilliantly between original genius and the sweet laxities of fame, were of a passion and mastery which he never exceeded. Before the completion of “The Light of the World,” in 1854, Hunt had already painted “The Awakening Conscience” (1853), “Claudio and Isabella” (1851), “The Hireling Shepherd” (1852), and “The Strayed Sheep,” called also “Our English Coasts” (1853). He now departed to commence those long, solitary, and most fruitful sojourns in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and less frequented parts of Palestine, which gave us, at the cost of years of intense and continuous labour, such great imaginative creations as “The Scapegoat” in 1855, “Christ in the Temple” in 1860, “The Shadow of Death” in 1874, and “The Triumph of the Innocents” in 1885. “The Shadow of Death” was purchased for £10,500; a price unparalleled for the work of any other living painter. The picture now hangs in the Manchester Corporation Gallery. Seven years were spent over “The Triumph of the Innocents,” pronounced by Ruskin to be “the greatest religious picture of the age.” The final version, completed in 1885, has recently been acquired by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, where it completes, with Millais’s “Lorenzo and Isabella” and Rossetti’s “Dante’s Dream,” a noble trio of the best Pre-Raphaelite type. Reverting, as he did but once, to more purely romantic subjects, and to that haunting theme of Keats which first inspired the young Brotherhood, Mr. Holman Hunt produced in 1867 the finest of his work in that direction, in the brilliant “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” which was the outcome of a visit to Florence in that year. His only important picture of later years has been the “May Morning on Magdalen Tower,” a fascinating reminiscence of Oxford life, exhibited in 1889.