National Gallery--a harmony of white upon white of indescribable graciousness and delicacy. Mary, a bashful, meditative, and childlike maiden, in a white garment, is shown in a half-kneeling attitude upon a white bed. The walls of the chamber are white, and in front of her there stands a frame at which she has been working; and a piece of embroidery, with a lily which she has begun, hangs over it. Before her stands the angel with flame rising from his feet, in solemn, peaceful gravity, as he extends towards her the stalk of the lily which he holds. A dove flies gently in through the window. Now, in spite of their romantic subjects the work of Hunt and Millais is lucid and temperate, while Rossetti is dreamily mystical. The two former were straightforward, true, and natural, whereas the simplicity of the latter was subtilised and consciously affected. It was due to the vibrating delicacy of his distempered, seething imagination that he was able to give himself a deceptive appearance of being a primitive artist. The creative power of the two former is an earnest power of the understanding, whereas in the latter there is a vague dreaminess, a tendency to luxuriate in his own moods, an efflorescence of tones and colours. In the one case there is an angular but single-minded study of nature; in the other there is the demureness and embarrassment of the Quattrocento, a demureness breaking into blossom, and an embarrassment full of charm--a romanticism which cherished the yearning for repose in the childlike and innocent Middle Ages, and clothed it with all the attractions of mysticism. Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, and Millais were realists in their drawing, men who wanted to represent objects with all possible accuracy, to be faithful in rendering the finest fibre of a petal and every thread in a fabric. Rossetti's picture was a symphonic ode in pigments, and he himself was one of the earliest of the modern lyricists of colour. This distinction became wider and wider with the course of time, and as early as 1858 he found himself deserted by his earlier comrades. Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, and especially Millais, in their further development, tended more and more to become Naturalists, and were finally led to completely realistic subjects from the immediate present by the inviolable fidelity with which they studied nature. On the other hand, Rossetti became the centre of a new circle of artists, who directed the current of what was originally Naturalism more and more into mysticism and refined archaism. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ ROSSETTI. BEATA BEATRIX. (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]