[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._ FORD MADOX BROWN. LEAR AND CORDELIA. (_By permission of Albert Wood, Esq., the owner of the picture._)] _Holman Hunt_ is the painter who has been most consistent in clinging throughout his life to these original principles of the Brotherhood. He is distinguished by a depth of thought which at last tends to become entirely elusive, and often a depth of spirit more profound than diver ever plumbed; but at the same time by an angular, gnarled realism which has scarcely its equal in all the European art of the century. "The Flight of Madeleine and Porphyro," from Keats' _Eve of St. Agnes_, was the first picture, the subject being borrowed in 1848 from his favourite poet. In the work through which he first acknowledged himself a member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he has given a plain and simple rendering of the scene in the introductory chapter of Bulwer Lytton's _Rienzi_. He has chosen the moment when Rienzi, kneeling beside the corpse of his brother, takes a vow of vengeance against the murderer who is riding away. The composition avoids any kind of conventional pyramidal structure. In the foreground every flower is painted and every colour is frankly set beside its neighbour without the traditional gradation. His third picture, "A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary," is not to be reckoned amongst his best performances. It is forced naïveté, suggesting the old masters, to unite two entirely different scenes upon the same canvas: in the background there are fugitives and pursuers, and a Druid, merely visible by his outstretched arms, inciting the populace to the murder of a missionary; in the foreground a hut open on all sides, which could really offer no protection at all. Yet in this hut a priest is hiding, tended by converted Britons. However, the drawing of the nude bodies is an admirable piece of realism; admirable, also, is the way in which he has expressed the fear of the inmates, and the fanatical bloodthirsty rage of the pursuers, and this without any false heroics, without any rhetoric based upon the traditional language of gesture. The picture from Shakespeare's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, with the motto, "Death is a fearful thing, and shamed life a hateful," is perhaps theatrical in its arrangement, though it is likewise earnest and convincing in psychological expression.