is a scene from the interior of London life; a denunciation of the vice of which the world is so careless; a sad, stern picture of the bitterness of sin. Millais is less in earnest, and his pictures, with many great technical merits, with portions of very exquisite painting, have rarely possessed any great worth as works of imagination. One of the tenderest of them all is the Huguenots, the girl and her lover parting, which is now becoming generally known through the engraving that has recently been published. The Autumn Leaves, which is exhibited at Manchester, is one of his least satisfactory pictures. But all these men are young, and what they have already accomplished is but as the promise of greater things to come. It is impossible, however, to look forward for these greater things, without a feeling of doubt and uncertainty as to their being produced. The times in which we are living are not fitted to develope and confirm the qualities on which the best results of Art depend. Ours is neither an age of composure nor of faith. It urges speedy results; it desires effective, rather than simple, truthful work. But the Pre-Raphaelites are exposed to especial dangers; just now to the dangers that come from success. And these are of two kinds; first, the undermining of that humility which is the secret of mastery; and secondly, the tendency to the development of peculiarities and mannerisms, to the exaggeration of special features that have attracted attention in their work, and which have a factitious value set upon them by the public, as they are taken to be the signs and passwords of initiation into the new school. But, lying deeper than these, there is a danger to Pre-Raphaelitism from the tendency to insist on too literal an application of its own principles. The best principles will not include all cases. The workings and ways of Nature are infinite, and the principles of Art are finite deductions from these infinite examples. As yet these deductions have been but imperfectly made. The most exact and truthful representation of Nature may be the rule of the artist, but it is not an easy thing to attain to an understanding of the truth of Nature. The actual is not always the real. Literal truth is not always exact truth; and the seeming truth, which is what Art must often represent, is very different from the absolute truth. And here there has been much stumbling in Pre-Raphaelitism, and there is likelihood of fall; likelihood of the actual being mistaken for the real, the show for the essence. It is, indeed, apparently, a tendency toward this error which has deprived most of the best pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites of the quality of _breadth_, a quality which Nature usually preserves in herself, which in painting takes the place of harmony in music, and which only the greatest painters have acquired.