At the last, his death, it has been affirmed by Mr. Theodore Watts, was due but indirectly to physical disease; primarily to the prolonged and terrible fervour of writing “The King’s Tragedy.” Out of such conditions of artistic expression came a depth and intensity of feeling incompatible with wide versatility or range of vision. Such a temperament must either specialize or achieve nothing. But it is the business of the historian to look behind temperament towards the deep and primal impulses of a nation and a century. To him the sum of temperaments becomes the spirit of an age; or rather, the nation itself, in the grasp of the age, is conceived as a living, thinking, struggling personality; complex, problematic, self- contradictory, but strong to inspire the same loyalties, the same aspirations, as the old world found in Rome, or mediæval Europe in the great mother-cities which were at once her burden and her pride. To study a temperament like Rossetti’s in its relation to the intellectual life of the age, and to ask how such a temperament was in its turn brought to bear upon some of the problems of that life, is to be confronted with much more than a personality or a career; is to deal with a wide and crucial phase in the history of a people. For the Pre-Raphaelite movement was much more than a revolution in the ideals and methods of painting. It was a single wave in a great reactionary tide—the ever rising protest and rebellion of our century against artificial authority, against tradition and convention in every department of life. It broke out, socially, with the French Revolution; it found voice in the poetic impulse which followed it in Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats; it spread from ethics to politics, it touched all morality and all knowledge, and it affected the whole literature of Europe from philosophy to fiction and from the drama to the lyric poem. Schumann and Chopin breathed it into music; Darwin, re-forming the world of science, laid in the doctrine of evolution the foundations of the new cosmogony. It remained for painting, the youngest of the arts, to enter last into the van of progress and take its stand against the classic and orthodox scholasticism now discredited and void.