Sir John Millais was born 8th June 1829, in Southampton, where his family had come from Jersey. Thus he is half a Frenchman by descent. His childhood was passed in Dinant in Brittany, but when he was nine years old he went to a London school of drawing. He was then the little fair-haired boy in a holland blouse, a broad sash, and a large sailor's collar, whom John Phillip painted in those days. When eleven he entered the Royal Academy, probably being the youngest pupil there; at thirteen he won a prize medal for the best drawing from the antique; at fifteen he was already painting; and at seventeen he exhibited an historical picture, "Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru," which was praised by the critics as the best in the exhibition of 1846. With "Elgiva," a work exhibited in 1847, this first period, in which he followed the lines of the now forgotten painter Hilton, was brought to an end. His next work, "Lorenzo and Isabella," now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, bore the letters P.R.B., as a sign of his new confession of faith. Microscopically exact work in detail has taken the place of the large bravura and the empty imitation of the Cinquecentisti. The theme was borrowed from one of Boccaccio's tales, _The Pot of Basil_--the tale on which Keats founded _Isabella_. A company of Florentines in the costume of the thirteenth century are assembled at dinner. Lorenzo, pale and in suppressed excitement, sits beside the lovely Isabella, looking at her with a glance of deep, consuming passion. Isabella's brother, angered at it, gives a kick to her dog. All the persons at the table are likenesses. The critic F. G. Stephens sat for the beloved of Isabella, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the toper holding his glass to his lips at the far right of the table. Even the ornaments upon the damask cloth, the screen, and the tapestry in the background are painted, stroke after stroke, with the conscientious devotion of a primitive painter. Jan van Eyck's brilliancy of colour is united to Perugino's suavity of feeling, and the chivalrous spirit of the _Decameron_ seized with the sureness of a subtle literary scholar. [Illustration: _L'Art._ MILLAIS. THE YEOMAN OF THE GUARD.]