But the new gospel, when Rossetti entered the Academy Schools, had only reached the initial stage of a “gospel of discontent.” It was still negative, indefinite, unpromising. Yet even in that early phase, the old, simple instincts of the missionary spirit are often potent, and fruitful in the development of ideas. “Andrew ... first findeth his own brother Simon,” and “Philip findeth Nathaniel,”—not designedly, perhaps, but rather by the spontaneous attraction of kindred souls; not necessarily with the deliberate aim of a propagandist, for it would be pretentious to credit a group of nineteenth-century young Britons in their teens with a very exalted conception of their artistic mission. There is every evidence that they were as unaffectedly boyish, and even school-boyish, as the most orthodox Englishman could wish them. It was well that they should not yet know the meaning of their own rebellion, or guess the effect to be wrought upon English art by Rossetti’s meeting with the first fellow-student who can in any sense be called his disciple. Probably it was an impulse of purely personal affection, or that magnetic charm of character which Rossetti exercised over almost all impressionable natures around him, rather than any deep affinity of purpose and ideal, that won to his side a younger and in many respects more brilliant aspirant, John Everett Millais, who had passed through his two years’ elementary training at Cary’s at a very early age, and in technical proficiency was already far ahead of his new friend. Born on the 8th of June, 1829, in Portland Place, Southampton, the first five years of his life were chiefly spent in Jersey (his father’s ancestral home), and the succeeding four at Dinan, in Brittany. In 1838, at the age of nine, he was entered at Cary’s Academy, then under the direction of Mr. Sass, where his drawing from the antique soon won a silver medal from the Society of Arts. In 1840, at the age of eleven, he entered the Royal Academy Schools; the youngest pupil ever admitted within their walls. Here he won a silver medal in 1843, and four years later a gold medal for historical painting with “The Benjamites Seizing their Brides,” shown at the British Institution in 1848. In 1846 his first exhibited picture, “Pizarro before the Inca of Peru,” appeared at the Royal Academy, where “Elgiva Seized by Odo” was shown in 1847.