As an example of the quiet and unforced sentiment which characterises so many of the pictures which Millais painted, this delightful composition deserves particular consideration. It has a certain severity of design and solemnity of manner, but in its suggestion of the sadness of autumn there is no trace of morbid sentimentality and no kind of theatrical effect. The picture is a sort of allegory expressed with exquisite tenderness, and with a simple frankness of manner which is especially persuasive.] It is interesting, too, to note that just at the moment when the attack was fiercest the Royal Academy showed its faith in Millais by electing him an Associate. He is said to have been the youngest student ever received into the Academy schools, and he must have been one of the youngest painters ever chosen as an Associate, for after his election it was discovered that he had not reached the age at which, under the Academy rules, admission to the Associateship was possible. So his election had to be declared invalid and he had to wait some few years longer--until 1853--for the official recognition of his claims. But it must assuredly be counted to the credit of the Academy that such readiness should have been shown to admit the ability of a young artist who was openly in rebellion against the fashions of his time, and whose work was by implication a condemnation of much that was being done even by members of the Academic circle. His election in 1853 came more as a matter of course; by that date he had won his way to a position which could scarcely be questioned even by the bitterest opponents of Pre-Raphaelitism, and he had laid securely the foundations of that remarkable popularity which he was destined to enjoy for the rest of his life. It would have been hard, indeed, to deny that he deserved whatever rewards were due to artistic merit of the highest order, for his pictures had passed well beyond the stage of brilliant promise into that of commanding achievement. His "Ophelia" and "The Huguenot" in 1852, his "Order of Release" and "The Proscribed Royalist" in 1853, and his exquisite "Portrait of Mr. Ruskin" in 1854, are to be accounted as masterly performances which would have done full credit to a painter whose skill had been matured by more than half a lifetime of strenuous effort, and which, as the productions of a young man who did not reach his twenty-fifth birthday until the summer of 1854, are of really extraordinary importance. The "Ophelia," "The Huguenot," and "The Order of Release," can be placed, indeed, among the most memorable expositions of his artistic conviction, and the "Portrait of Mr. Ruskin" ranks with the "Ophelia" as one of the most astonishing examples of searching and faithful study which can be found in modern art.