of quaint and simple, and sometimes of elaborate, grace; and for the untiring record of the particular type of maidenhood, seen best perhaps in the ‘Golden Staircase,’ or in ‘Venus’s Looking-Glass,’ he stands alone. We name those pictures rather than, for instance, the ‘Days of Creation,’ or any of his various ‘Seasons,’ because in them he is at his happiest--his girls, though in the work of the suave decorator they are never essentially various, can be radiant as well as doleful. His men have plenty of wistfulness, but they have rarely energy, strength, decision. They are even, in a measure, sexless. And of childhood, Burne-Jones has never been an inspired, or even, it would seem, a particularly interested chronicler. Of course, it must be remembered that Burne-Jones is judged unjustly when judged by the rules of even the least narrow realism. He painted, not the world of our own day, or of any day--least of all the Kensington in which he lived, and slept, and had his studio--but a world he had imagined and created; a world his conception of which was fed, no doubt, by the earlier and graver of mid-Italian art. Imagination, now stimulated by legend, now supported by classic lore, and now the product of the brooding of an isolated mind--that is really the genesis, the _raison d’être_, the Alpha and the Omega of his art. Burne-Jones had, at his best, and especially in his middle period--the days of the ‘Chant d’Amour,’ with its fitly welcomed splendours of crimson and blue and golden brown--a wonderful gift of colour; and, even where the draughtsmanship of the human figure left something to be wished for, he was a marvellous, a loving, and a patient draughtsman of flower and of herb. The backgrounds of some of his inventions, in landscape and the architecture of towns, were of strange and mystic quaintness. Sometimes, in these, he recalled almost the spirit, the mystery, almost the charm, of the backgrounds of the prints by Albert Dürer. The great Dürer!--well, that is saying much. But we have left to the last what was perhaps Burne-Jones’s most essential characteristic, certainly his greatest accomplishment. We mean his gift of composition of line, his power of precisely and perfectly filling, and never overcrowding, the space it was his business to occupy. His composition of light and shade was less remarkable. He was a master of agreeable outline, of flowing and spontaneous tracery. But if it is not his imagination which is to keep his memory green, in the minds of the students of Art--and we doubt whether, with all his very individual merits, it really is--then it is that in which, in all our generation, and perhaps in all our English School, he may be accounted to have most possessed--the humbler faculty of patterning, of weaving faultless webs of subtle line over the surface, large or small, which was devoted to the exposition of whatever chanced to be his theme. (_Standard_, 18th June 1898.)