It would serve no purpose to go again and at length into the nature of this attack. Charles Dickens and many other great men lent their names to it, and the Brethren were compelled to face evil days in consequence. But in the darkest hour a saviour appeared. Ruskin, who before the outcry hardly knew of the existence of the school, had his attention drawn to it by Coventry Patmore, and with characteristic fearlessness and energy plunged into the fray. In a series of letters to the "Times" he defended the artists at all points, from the charge of being ignorant copyists and realists, the accusation that they could not draw, the alleged conspiracy against Raphael, and finally from the subtlest insinuation of all, because it sounded so professional, the charge that they knew not the laws of perspective. This ardent championship had one curious effect. In his warmth of defence Ruskin had not only combatted the statement of faults, but had revelled in laying down an elaborate statement of principles. Thus it came about that the original ideas out of which the Brotherhood had grown, ideas of a broad and possibly nebulous character, became transmuted into hard and fast rules of conduct and of practice, which the Brotherhood more or less had to accept, partly perhaps out of gratitude to their benefactor, partly because they agreed with them in theory, and partly because they may not have seen how far they led. On the other hand, if we are not to credit the "Pre-Raphaelites" with all the fine sentiments attributed to them in Ruskin's inspired defence, it is absurd to imagine, as some have done, that they failed to take themselves or their work seriously because Rossetti in his family letters used to speak flippantly of his unlucky little picture, which, like a curse, had come home to roost. Men often enough speak lightly to friends of things which have lain at the heart; and if Rossetti joked to his brother about "the blessed eyesore" and "the blessed white daub," it is none the less true that he had striven to put all his thoughts and all his knowledge into it, with such success that it reveals to us to-day an intensity of feeling and reverence which few modern painters have emulated, and to which Rossetti in his later work did not always attain.