Such a concrete study of nature as was made by the pre-Raphaelites of necessity led at last to entirely realistic pictures from modern life. In their biblical and poetic pictures they had started from the conviction that new life-blood could only be poured into the old conventional types, which had gradually become meaningless by tactfully drawing the models for them from popular life. They believed, as the masters of Florence and Bruges had done before them, that there could be no good painting without strict dependence on the model; that it was of the utmost importance to give a poetic or legendary figure the stamp of nature, the strong savour of individuality. All their creations are based upon the elements of portrait painting, even when they illustrate remote scenes from the New Testament or from mediæval poetry. And these elements at last led them altogether to give up transposing such figures into an alien _milieu_, and simply to paint what was offered by their own surroundings. In this way they reached the goal which was arrived at in French painting through Courbet and Ribot. It is due in the first place to the pre-Raphaelites that the well-meant and moderately painted _genre_ picture of the old style, which, with its wealth of pathetic stories, was once a prime source of supposed artistic pleasure, was finally vanquished in England, and made way for earnest and vigorous painting,--painting which sought to make its effect by purely artistic means, and proudly declined attempt to conceal intrinsic weakness in "interesting" subject drawn from external sources. As early as 1855 Millais exhibited a picture in the Royal Academy which Ruskin called a truly great work containing the elements of immortality--"The Rescue." It represented a fireman who has carried three children from a burning house and laid them in the arms of their parents. Narrative purport was entirely renounced. The fireman was treated without sentimentality, and in a way that suggested the cool fulfilment of a duty, and the agitation of the parents was also rendered without any dash of melodrama. Then there followed that masterpiece of exquisite and soft colouring, tender and moving expression, and infinite grace, "The Gambler's Wife," sadly taking up the cards which have brought her misery upon her. In 1874 was painted "The North-West Passage," a sort of modern symbol of the forceful, enterprising English people who have populated and subdued half the world from their little island kingdom. "There is a passage to the Pole, and England will find it--must find it." These are more or less the words spoken by Trelawney, the old friend and comrade of Byron in Greece. With a chart before him he is brooding over the plan of the North-West Passage, and upon his own outstretched hand, which would fain hold the future in its grasp, the hand of a youthful woman is soothingly laid, as she sits at his feet reading to him the narrative of the last voyage of discovery.