And this same stringent painter of character commands, as few others, the soft light brush of a painter of children. No one since Reynolds and Gainsborough has painted with so much character as Millais the dazzling freshness of English youth; the energetic pose of a boy's head or the beauty of an English girl--a thing which stands in the world alone: the soft, glancing, silken locks, rippling to a _blonde cendrée_, pale, delicate little faces, pouting little mouths, and great, shining blue, dreamy, childish eyes. Sometimes they stand in rose-coloured dresses embroidered with silver in front of a deep green curtain, or sit reading upon a dark red carpet flowered with black. At other times they are arrayed like the little Infantas of Velasquez, and play with a spaniel like the Doge's children of Titian, or hold out with both hands an apron full of flowers, which Millais paints with a high degree of finish. A spray of pale red roses, chrysanthemums, or lilies stands near. One must be a great master of characterisation to paint conscious, dignified, and earnest feminine beauty like that of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, and at the same time that fragrant perfume of the fresh and dewy spring of youth which breathes from Millais' pictures of children. [Illustration: PHILLIP. THE LETTER-WRITER, SEVILLE.] Millais is one of those men in the history of nineteenth-century painting who are as forcible and healthy as they are many-sided. I do not know one who could have developed so swiftly from a style of the most minute exactness to one of the most powerful breadth; not one who could have united such poetry of conception with such an enormous knowledge of human beings; not one who could have been so like Proteus in variety--at one moment charming, at another dreamy, at another entirely positive. In their firm structure and largeness of manner his landscapes sometimes recall Théodore Rousseau. And now the pre-Raphaelite is just a little evident in an excess of detail. He paints every blade of grass and every small plant, though there is at the same time a largeness in the midst of this scrupulous exactitude. He does not merely see the isolated fact through a magnifying lens, but has eyes that are sensitive to the poetry of the whole, and in spite of all study of detail he sometimes reaches a total effect which is altogether impressionist. His picture "Chill October" has an airy life, a grey, vibrating atmosphere, such as only John Constable painted elsewhere.