Moreover, they find in the primitive artists that simplicity which is most refreshing of all to overstrained spirits. Having produced Byron, Shelley, and Turner, the English were artistic _gourmets_, sated with all enjoyments in the realms of the intellect, and they now meditated works through which yet a new thrill of beauty might pass through the imagination. In the primitive masters they discovered all the qualities which had vanished from art since the sixteenth century--inofficious purity, innocent and touching Naturalism, antiquated austerity, and an enchanting depth of feeling. Jaded with other experiences, they admired in those naïve spirits the capacity for ecstatic rapture and vision--in other words, for the highest gratification. If one could but have in this nineteenth century such feelings as were known to Dante, the gloomy Florentine; Botticelli, the great Jeremiah of the Renaissance; or the tender mystic Fra Angelico! Surfeited with modernity, and endowed with nerves of acute refinement, artists went back in their fancy to this luxuriously blissful condition, and finally came to the point at which modernity was transformed once more into childish babble and the unbelieving materialism of the present age into a mystical and romantic union with the old currents of emotion. Under the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti English pre-Raphaelitism now entered upon a new and entirely different phase. [Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. _Mag. of Art._] Although Rossetti was the soul of the earlier movement, he was a man whose temperament was even then essentially different from that of his comrades Millais and Hunt, who founded the Brotherhood with him in 1848. Even the two works which he exhibited with them in 1849 and 1850 make one feel the great gulf which lay between him and them. In the former year, when Hunt was represented by his "Rienzi," and Millais by his "Lorenzo and Isabella," Rossetti produced his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin." In the following, when Hunt painted "The Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary" and Millais "The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter," Rossetti came forward with his "Ecce Ancilla Domini." "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" was a little picture of austere simplicity and ascetic character; it was intentionally angular in drawing, and possessed a certain archaic bloom. The Virgin, clad in grey garments, sits at a curiously shaped frame embroidering a lily with gold threads upon a red ground. The flower she is copying stands before her in a vase, and a little angel, with roseate wings, is watering it with an air of abashed reverence. St. Anne is busy by the side of the Virgin--both being, respectively, portraits of the artist's mother and sister--and in the background St. Joachim is binding a vine to a trellis. And several Latin books are lying upon the floor. The second work, "Ecce Ancilla Domini," is the familiar picture which is now in the