their practice; but they were not peculiar in that,--all youth, if it is earnest at all, is earnest for truth, or earnest rather for that particular side of truth which happens just then to have been revealed, and of which it exaggerates the value. Much has been written about the Pre-Raphaelite ‘movement’ and its supreme importance--as if it were a great religious Reformation and a French Revolution rolled into one. In History it is destined to be remembered because it was a phase through which two or three men of genius passed--a something, moreover, that for the moment welded them together. It will not be recollected, because at a later time mere imitative weaklings, by the dozen, made feeble fight under what they professed to be its banner. The interest, then, for sensible people, in Millais’s early pictures, lies, not in the fact that they were Pre-Raphaelite, but in the fact that they showed, many of them, an intensity of vision, a profundity of poetic feeling, which is the property of gifted and of eager youth. The passionate, constant devotion--the devotion of a minute which lasts, you feel, for a lifetime; the ‘moment eternal,’ as the great poet puts it--of the Puritan Maiden and of the Cavalier she helps, is the interest of the ‘Concealed Royalist.’ The burning love-affair of the ‘Huguenot’ is the interest of a canvas on which, before the days when the aesthete had invented ‘intensity’ of attitude, Millais had determined that his lovers should be intense, instead of sentimental. Millais was in those years occupied very much with the presentation, never of strictly sensuous enjoyment (Rossetti’s field, rather than his), but of violent emotion, and uncontrolled, almost uncontrollable, impulse. His people felt keenly, but with the elevation of poetic natures, or of a poetic mood. And Millais painted them when their blood ran high. He chose the incident that seemed to him the most dramatic in all their story. He painted them on the crest of the wave--at the moment of crisis. This, however, like the more naïve Pre-Raphaelitism of a yet earlier time, was but a phase--remarkable now chiefly because it has been so absolutely outlived; nay, because so much of the view of life taken subsequently by its author has, dominating it, a spirit so opposed to this one. But the transition was not rapid: the ‘Autumn Leaves’ of 1856, and the ‘Vale of Rest’ of 1860, have, at least, the poetic quality to the full, though with no violence of emotion. Rather, they are suggestive and reticent; weird and extraordinarily expressive: in the one there is depicted the wistfulness of childhood, in the other the melancholy resignation of a nun to whom ‘rest’ means brooding on a Past more eventful and more poignant than the occupation of her present day.