Art is more of a trade now, than it was when Raphael's studio had no other name than _bottega_--in English, shop; and moreover, it is an emasculate and man-milliner sort of a trade, instead of one demanding strong brains, and a brave and believing heart. It is a trade mainly conversant with miserable things and petty aims--with vanity, and ostentation and vulgarity, and sensuality and frivolity--no longer dealing with themes of prayer and praise, with the glories of beatitude, or the horror of damnation, with the perpetuation of family dignities and devotions, the recording of great events, the dignifying of public and national, or the beautifying of private and individual life. It is a trade in ornament, and its Academy is a shop, and its Exhibition a display of rival wares, in which the best hope and the sole aim of the many is to catch the eye of a customer; and he who "colours most highly, is sure to please." As a comprehensive indictment of the commercialism and triviality of Victorian art this leaves little to be desired. For an illustration of _Punch's_ altered opinion of the P.R.B.'s it may suffice to quote his palinode in 1853:-- Will you consider me ridiculous or blind when I assure you, on my honour as a puppet and a public performer, that these young gentlemen have written for me this year four of the sweetest and deepest and most thoughtful books I have read since I laid down Mr. Millais's historical romance of _The Huguenot_, last year? I am sensible of the omniscience of the daily, and some of the weekly papers, and I am aware that this is an opinion which should not be breathed within ear-shot of places where they take in _The Times_, and the _Morning Post_, and the _Examiner_. But I am a sort of chartered libertine, and nobody will believe anything I say is serious, so I can enjoy the luxury of saying what I feel, having no character to keep up. Then I tell you frankly--not forgetting Edwin Landseer's two grand cantos of his Highland Poem, _Night and Morning by the Lochside_, or Stanfield's noble paean-picture of the Battered Hull that carries the body of Nelson, like a Viking with his ship for bier--not forgetting these and other picture-books well worth reading--I tell you that Hunt's _Claudio and Isabella_ is to me _the_ book of the collection, though it records in colours what Shakespeare has written in words; and that little, if at all after it, comes Millais's _Order of Release_, and then the _Strayed Sheep_ and _Proscribed Royalist_ of the same authors. I do not mean to put either after the other, so I bracket them." In accepting the principles of the P.R.B.'s _Punch_ shows all the zeal of the convert, as may be gathered from the following discourse published shortly afterwards:--