Millais was a born portrait painter. His cool and yet finely sensitive nature, his simple, manly temperament, directed him to this department, which rather gravitates to the observant and imitative than to the creative pole of art. In his pictures he has the secret of enchanting and of repelling; he has arrived at really definite issues in portrait painting. His likenesses are all of them as convincing as they are actual. Together with the Venetians and with Velasquez, Millais belongs to the master spirits of the grand style, which relies upon the large movement of lines, in figure and in face, upon the broad foundation of surfaces, and the strict subordination of individual details. His figures are characteristic and recognisable even in outline. He makes no effort to render them interesting by picturesque attitudes, or to vivify them by placing them in any situation. There they stand calm, and sometimes stiff and cold; they make no attempt at conversation with the spectator, nor come out of themselves, as it were, but fix their eyes upon him with an air of well-bred composure and indifference. Even the hands are not made use of for characterisation. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ MILLAIS. THE VALE OF REST.] The extraordinary intensity of life which sparkles in his great figures, so simply displayed, is almost exclusively concentrated in the heads. Millais is perhaps the first master of characterisation amongst the moderns. To bold and powerful exposition there is united a noble and psychical gaze. The eyes which he paints are like windows through which the soul is visible. [Illustration: _Mag. of Art._ FORD MADOX BROWN. THE LAST OF ENGLAND.] Amongst his portraits of men, those of Gladstone and Hook stand in the first rank: as paintings perhaps they are not specially eminent; both have an opaque, sooty tone, from which Millais' works not unfrequently suffer, but as a definition of complex personalities they are comparable only with the best pictures of Lenbach. How firmly does the statesman hold himself, despite his age, the old tree-feller, the stern idealist, a genuine English figure chiselled out of hard wood. The play of light centres all the interest on the fine, earnest, and puckered features, the lofty forehead, the energetic chin, and the liquid, thoughtful eyes. All the biography of Gladstone lies in this picture, which is simpler and greater in intuition than that which Lenbach painted of him. Hook, with his broad face, furrowed with wrinkles, looks like an apostle or a fisher. Millais has looked into the heart of this man, who has in him something rugged and faithful, massive and tender; the painter of vigorous fishermen and vaporous sunbeams. Hook's landscapes have a forceful, earnest, and well-nigh religious effect, and something patriarchal and biblical lies in his gentle, reflective, and contemplative glance.