“Modern Painters” struck the keynote of the coming change. A fellow- student lent the volumes to Holman Hunt, who in his turn shared them with his friends; and reading together, they found therein, not only a sympathy for their own revolt, but a definite guidance for their aspirations. With the authority of the trained draughtsman and _connoisseur_ as well as with the force and fascination of the literary artist, Ruskin declared for originality and truth in design, as against the imitations and artifices of degenerate schools, in a voice that would brook no compromise. Like Carlyle, his whole being was possest with that passionate scorn of pretensions and shams, that hatred of formalism and of every species of cant, which swept like a cleansing wind over Europe after the French Revolution, and which, if its immediate results were iconoclastic and disruptive, was so much the better preparation for the reconstruction to follow. Ruskin bade men turn, from the Art of the past, to Nature, and seek fresh inspiration at its primal source. Through Nature alone, he said, they would reach truth, and finding it, gain also the power to interpret and reveal. And Nature was a jealous mistress; only to a faithful lover would she unveil the exquisite mysteries of her beauty; unto his ear alone would she whisper the high secrets of her soul; she would endure no translator, no partial and distorted reflection of her face: the man himself must worship at her inmost shrine, and learn her lesson there direct and clear. —A truism, it seems to us, who have seen the swinging of the pendulum still further in the naturalistic direction, since the reaction in divers quarters against convention and precedent has carried many to the opposite extreme. Yet, in the history of the world, the demand for precedent and conformity, the love of imitation, the morbid hatred of novelty and the dread of original experiment, which appear in almost every crisis of man’s development, exhibit one of the most curious phases of the human mind. Psychologists might argue at length as to the relation between indolence and cowardice in the strange game of “follow- my-leader” played by humanity from age to age,—and might attribute both to a vague and deep sense of the bitter cost of all knowledge, and a consequent and not wholly vain tenacity towards things apparently knowable and known.