It was the accident of youth which set him for a while under the influence of men of a deeper spiritual tendency, and it was not his fault, nor indeed our misfortune, that when the period of youth had passed he should have applied himself with ever-increasing earnestness to the development of those gifts in portraiture and in landscape which have left him pre-eminent among the painters of our school. At the time I was not able to judge fairly of the causes which led to his ultimate desertion of those earlier ideals, and I could only remember with a regret, too harshly expressed, that we were no longer to expect of him another “Huguenot” or “Ophelia,” or to welcome again from his hand such achievements as the “Carpenter’s Shop” or the “Feast of Lorenzo.” But a knowledge of the man himself very speedily enabled me to take a juster view of his place as a painter. There are artists in every line, in literature as well as in painting, whose personality does not willingly associate itself with their work. This was certainly true of Browning, who would seem in social intercourse to be almost perversely desirous of enabling you to forget that he was a poet, and it was true no less of Millais, who rather sought by preference in his leisure hours the companionship of men who were not concerned with the art he professed. Millais had about him, as I first recall him, and retained to the end of his life, even in the days that [Illustration: THE FINDING OF MOSES BY PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER. From _Lays of the Holy Land_. By Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A. Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. (Reproduced from their _Fifty Years’ Work_.) _By permission of Messrs. James Nisbet and Co., Ltd._ _To face page 87._ ] were passed under the shadow of a mortal sickness, a delightful buoyancy of character that was enchaining and infectious. In his view of his own art there was occasionally something of the victorious arrogance of a school-boy who has lately carried off the first prize, an arrogance that was nevertheless consistent with a deep modesty of character that showed itself in his reverent attitude towards nature, where he was ever ready to admit that he had found his rival and his master. As far as my own experience of him went, he was never very eager to discuss the work of his contemporaries, although he could be amply generous on occasion towards the earlier experiments of younger men. When he referred to the works of the older masters it seemed to me that there was something of defiant challenge in his tone, as though he were ready to do battle with any one of them in his own person and in his own painting.