It is not needful now to revive the memories of that fierce hostility of criticism which greeted his earlier efforts. Rossetti’s determined reticence in regard to the exhibition of his work left Burne-Jones in those earlier days to bear the whole brunt of the attack, for the art of Millais and Holman Hunt made a somewhat different appeal and claimed a separate victory. Nor was it wonderful that what lay in the mind of both to do should at first have seemed tinged by something of determined archaic affectation. The temper of their work was strange to the world to whom it was offered at first in a form so tentative, and also confessedly so incomplete. The history of English Painting, even in its greatest achievement, has left no tradition to which they could appeal, and, indeed, if we take a wider range of view, it may be said with equal truth that, since the downfall of the great school of Florence, Art throughout Europe had taken a direction which made the efforts of these younger men seem like a wilful neglect of the accepted models of style. Such English masters of an earlier time as had attempted to enter into this higher realm of imaginative painting--Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, to name only the leaders--had wrecked their lives in the vain endeavour suddenly to renew the splendours of the great masters of the sixteenth century. With the advent of the pre-Raphaelite movement, marked by a determined research of greater reality in the rendering of actual fact, the failure of these earlier experiments became only the more manifest; and it was left for that little group in which Rossetti and Burne-Jones stand pre-eminent to realise the truth that, if imagination could ever again resume its place in pictorial art, the result must be achieved, not by an endeavour to repeat the triumphs of the past at the epoch of its culminating glory, but by retracing the stream to its source and beginning again, where Florence had begun in the earlier period of her history. It was, I think, the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery that gave Burne-Jones’s critics reason to pause in their pitiless onslaught of ridicule and rebuke. But even then the fight was not ended, and among the many members of the Academy itself the hostility continued almost without check. I remember going round that exhibition with Mr. Gladstone, and recalling a phrase of his which he used in reference to this very feeling that was even then sufficiently openly expressed. Standing before one of Burne-Jones’s pictures which he was warmly admiring, he turned to me and said, “Dislike of such a painter I can understand, but such intolerance of dislike as I find on every hand I do not comprehend.”