My elder sister had already begun a serious study of painting, and that no doubt partly influenced my taste as a boy. Not that my keen interest in the drama ever lapsed, even during the period when I was qualifying myself as an Art Critic; but it lay dormant for a time, in so far at least as my journalistic occupation was concerned; and apart from my daily work upon the _Globe_, and those lighter essays on general and social topics contributed to the _Examiner_ and the _Saturday Review_, my main energies for several years to come were destined to be employed in the criticism of pictorial art. It is not quite easy now to realise the extraordinary interest with which the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy were then greeted by those whose minds had been awakened to the new movement in painting. I can remember year after year, from the age of sixteen, presenting myself on each opening Monday at eight o’clock in the morning at the doors of Burlington House, and snatching an hour there before making my way to the City. The pre-Raphaelite movement had begotten a freshly awakened spirit, not only in the workers themselves, but in those who worshipped them. The advent of Ruskin had kindled a new flame which made a study of Art something more than mere dilettantism. It was with something almost of religious fervour that we awaited the advent of a new Millais or Holman Hunt, for it was then only on rare occasions that we had the chance of seeing an example of the work of Rossetti. Art in more recent days has come to make, even in the hands of its greatest professors, a more technical appeal, and those of us who are not of the calling are now somewhat sternly bidden to confine ourselves to dumb appreciation, and are severely warned not to venture to deliver opinions on matters in which we are not qualified by special study. This is the fate of all art, either literary or pictorial, at those seasons of impaired vitality when it falls under the domination of men of the “métier.” It is the assured sign of a passing period of decadence. The moment when the artist has missed the spirit which links his work with the wider emotional movement of his generation, is always the moment when he most zealously and most loudly acclaims the detachment and independence of his calling.