Had Rossetti's knowledge of the technique of painting, its science, been equal to his feeling for it, he had certainly founded a school of the truest art; but, for schools, the grammar is the first requisite, and Rossetti had himself never been taught what he would have had to teach. His feeling for color was on a par with his power of composition, and it seems to me that since Tintoret no one has equaled him in the combination. Of modern men, I know only Baron Leys and Delacroix who possessed to the same degree the power of spontaneous, harmonious composition, except Turner in landscape; all other modern art has, to my mind, more or less of the _pose plastique_, the air of the _tableau vivant_. His death, at a time when he should have been at the height of his powers, a premature victim of his undisciplined temperament and the irregularities it led him into, coupled with the over-intense mental vivacity, equally undisciplined, is one of the most melancholy incidents in the chaotic artistic movement of our time. Ford Madox Brown, who was his first master, and is commonly considered to have exercised a great influence on Rossetti, in my opinion had none that was permanent. He was Rossetti's antithesis, and in himself as inconsequent as Rossetti was logical. He was severely and uncompromisingly rationalistic; with the conscience of a Puritan he was an absolute skeptic, with a profound contempt for all religious matters, while Rossetti, with all his irregularities, never could escape from his religious feeling, which was the part of his constitution he possessed in common with his sisters. Brown had, of the purely artistic qualities, only the academic; he was neither a colorist nor a great draughtsman; his art was literary, didactic, and, except for occasional dramatic passages, unemotional and unpoetic. The predominance of the intellectual powers in him was so great that the purely artistic view of nature was impossible to him; and his artistic education, while curiously erratic and short-sighted in its elementary and technical stage, was intellectually large in academic and literary qualities, and comprehensive. It appears to me that the telling of the story was, in his estimation, the highest office of art, so that, while his drawing was bad in style, his execution scrappy and amateurish and deficient in breadth and subordination, his compositions were often masterly, fine in conception, and harmonious in line, in the pen-and-ink study; but the want of _ensemble_ and the insubordination of the insistent detail generally made his work less imposing when it was on canvas than in the first study. His habit of finishing from corner to corner, without having the whole work broadly laid out before him to guide him in the proper subordination of the details to the general effect, made it impossible for him to make his pictures broad and effective. His most successful pictures were, therefore, the small ones, in which the impossibility of too much