Before closing our record it will be well to quote, as we promised earlier, some of the contemporary criticism that Sir Frederic's work has encountered from time to time; and especially the criticism of his earlier performances, while he was still in the years of his pre-Academic probation. As a provocation to criticism, most interesting of all is his picture, the _Cimabue's Madonna carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence_, upon which we have already commented. As we may here remind our readers, it was painted at Rome chiefly, in 1853-4, and was exhibited at the Academy of 1855. In that year, as good fortune would have it, Mr. Ruskin issued for the first time, "Notes on some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy." Some pages of this famous pronouncement are devoted to this very picture, and we cannot do better than quote freely from a criticism so remarkable. "This is a very important and very beautiful picture," says Mr. Ruskin. "It has both sincerity and grace, and is painted on the purest principles of Venetian art--that is to say, on the calm acceptance of the whole of nature, small and great, as, in its place, deserving of faithful rendering. The great secret of the Venetians was their simplicity. They were great colourists, not because they had peculiar secrets about oil and colour, but because when they saw a thing red, they painted it red; and ... when they saw it distinctly, they painted it distinctly. In all Paul Veronese's pictures, the lace borders of the table cloths or fringes of the dresses are painted with just as much care as the faces of the principal figures; and the reader may rest assured that in all great art it is so. Everything in it is done as well as it _can_ be done. Thus in the picture before us, in the background is the Church of San Miniato, strictly accurate in every detail; on the top of the wall are oleanders and pinks, as carefully painted as the church; the architecture of the shrine on the wall is well studied from thirteenth-century Gothic, and painted with as much care as the pinks; the dresses of the figures, very beautifully designed, are painted with as much care as the faces: that is to say, all things throughout with as much care as the painter could bestow. It necessarily follows that what is most difficult (_i.e._ the faces) should be comparatively the worst done. But if they are done as well as the painter could do them, it is all we have to ask; and modern artists are under a wonderful mistake in thinking that when they have painted faces ill, they make their pictures more valuable by painting the dresses worse.