foreground is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy in a bed-gown, and at his side a kneeling woman so horrible in her ugliness that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England. The two almost naked carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards in a high state of varicose veins are received. Their very toes have walked out of St. Giles’s.” Another writer likened the figure of the boy Christ, whose hand, in the picture, has been wounded at his task, to “a miserable child scratching itself against a rusty nail in Seven Dials.” To such criticism it might easily be retorted that the world is more deeply concerned to-day with the dark problems of Seven Dials and St. Giles’s than with the life of any child in history, save in so far as the latter may illumine and interpret the mysteries of the importunate hour; and that the painter who so translates into present- day life the eternal tragedy of toil and pain as to press home to the conscience of a nation the daily re-crucifixion of the Christ in its own vast labour-houses,—whose modern reading of the ancient tale suggests the divine potentialities of all childhood and the universal pathos of human love “wounded in the house of friends,”—has given us a greater picture, and a more religious picture, than if he had painted for us all the angels in Heaven. “Ferdinand Lured by Ariel” may be taken as the first landscape produced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was painted—according to the rule— directly from nature. The background was taken from a spot in a park attached to Shotover House, near Oxford, where Millais was staying as the guest of Mr. Drury. A lady who saw the young artist at work upon this subject distinctly recalls his application of a magnifying-glass to the branch of a tree he was painting, in order to study closely the veins of the leaves. This was a literal following of that patient analysis of minutiæ in nature which characterized the Italian Pre- Raphaelites, and is especially noticeable in the early landscapes of Leonardo da Vinci; though he departed in his maturity from his former love of detail, and began to conventionalize items into generalities. Even the lizards in the foreground of “Ferdinand and Ariel” were faithful portraits of certain small favourites brought by Millais from Jersey to serve their turn among his sitters. The friend who sat for Ferdinand relates that the painting of the face, though a marvel of finish, and perfect in technique, was accomplished in a single sitting. A detailed pencil drawing was already on the canvas, and the laying on of the colour occupied only five hours. The vivid colouring of the whole picture, and the use of metal instead of pigment for the gold-cloth worn by Ferdinand (after the method of the early Italian masters, followed also by Rossetti in “Ecce Ancilla Domini”), were the subject of scarcely