Notwithstanding his later technical development, nothing that Sir John Millais has painted will be remembered more definitely and firmly than these; and it is noteworthy that they are among the first pictures in which he relied in great measure upon landscape to express or suggest the sentiment which it was the picture’s business to convey. ‘Spring Flowers’ of 1860 was in a lighter and gayer vein, if it is, as we believe, the picture known originally as ‘Apple Blossom’--girls lounging in an orchard under the loaded and whitened boughs. ‘My First Sermon,’ in 1863, was more purely popular than anything we have named. It dealt with childhood almost in the spirit of Édouard Frère, but with its author’s singular realism of execution. ‘Vanessa,’ in 1869, marked Millais as occupied increasingly with technical problems--with the attainment of an almost novel boldness of effect. It is, like so many pieces of his middle and later middle time, brilliant in colour and brush-work. No one now thinks, we suppose, of claiming it as dramatic--that is, of connecting it especially with the character of the lady who came off second-best in the affections of Swift. Very soon after the exhibition of ‘Vanessa,’ Millais, who had already sought impressiveness in landscape background, turned to pure landscape as a theme sufficient for the exercise of his art. He gave us then ‘Chill October,’ the October of the north and of the lowlands, with the wind passing over water, and the reeds and scanty foliage bent aside by its breath. The picture excited interest. It was visibly forcible. The conception of the scene, too, was unusual and, of course, unconventional; but in some later landscape work, Millais may have been at once nearer to Nature and nearer to the attainment of a perfected art. ‘New Laid Eggs,’ in 1873, with naïveté of expression and dexterity of handling, but with a rusticity not very convincing, was a ‘taking’ picture of happy, healthy, self-confident girlhood. Its importance, in the volume of its author’s work, was quite eclipsed the following year by the ‘North-West Passage,’ a canvas full of interest almost romantic, yet most direct in its record of character--the main figure being, indeed, a portrait of that Trevelyan who is associated in most men’s minds with the career of Shelley. He it was who in Sir John Millais’s picture posed as the sturdy sailor whose imagination engages him in a remote and unknown voyage. When, many years after it had been painted, the ‘North-West Passage’ was seen again in the Millais Exhibition, at the Fine Art Society’s or at the Grosvenor Gallery, it was felt that at the moment of its execution the painter had reached the summit of his real artistic greatness, the masculine and potent hand here best executing that which had been prompted by a mind at its most vigorous. ‘A Jersey Lily,’ in 1878, was a tribute to the then girlish beauty of Mrs. Langtry, who at about the same period was recorded by Mr.