Tuesday 13th to Thursday 15th.--On Tuesday Ruskin’s letter appeared in _The Times_. He says that he believes Millais and Hunt to be at a turning-point of their career, “from which they may either sink into nothingness or rise to very real greatness.” The explanation he gives of the name “Præraphaelite” is very sensible; “They intend to return to early days in this one point only--that, as far as in them lies, they will draw either what they see or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent, irrespective of any conventional rules of picture-making; and they have chosen their unfortunate though not inaccurate name because all artists did this before Raphael’s time, and after Raphael’s time did _not_ this, but sought to paint fair pictures rather than represent stern facts; of which the consequence has been that, from Raphael’s time to this day, historical art has been in acknowledged decadence.” Ruskin then deals with the nonsense about “imitation of false perspective”; asserting that the only error in the five pictures (including Collins’s) is that the top of the green curtain in the distant window (of the _Mariana_) has too low a vanishing point; and that he will undertake to prove a dozen worse errors in any twelve of the most popular pictures of the day containing architecture;--and, as to the accusation of “drapery snapped instead of folded,” that, “putting aside the small Mulready, and the works of Thorburn and Sir W. Ross, and perhaps some others of those in the miniature-room which he has not examined, there is not a single study of drapery in the whole Academy, be it in large works or small, which, for perfect truth, power, and finish, could be compared for an instant with the black sleeve of the Julia, or with the velvet on the breast and the chain-mail of the Valentine; or with the white draperies on the table in _Mariana_, and of the right-hand figure in _The Dove returning to the Ark_; and further that, as studies both of drapery and every minor detail, there has been nothing in art so earnest or so complete as these pictures since the days of Albert Durer.” He concludes with objecting to the Sylvia and the figure in the _Dove_ picture, on the score of deficient beauty, and hopes “to be permitted to enter into more special criticism in a future letter.” Altogether the letter is very satisfactory; anything but unqualified praise, which is well in one sense, as doing away with the accusation of partisanship. Ruskin himself expressly disclaims personal acquaintance. One point which I think it might be advantageous to notice in a letter from some of ourselves to _The Times_ is that Ruskin says something of P.R.B. “Romanist and tractarian tendencies,” in reference to the _Mariana_ and to Collins’s picture. Such tendencies, as utterly non-existent in fact, it might not be amiss to repudiate; the doing which would, besides, afford an opportunity for entering into any other details or