For two years he remained under the tuition of Mr. Sass, and, helped by his teaching and by a good deal of work from the casts in the British Museum, the boy developed so rapidly that when he was only eleven years old he gained admission to the Royal Academy Schools, the youngest student, it is said, that has ever been received into them. His career there was a series of successes. For six years he laboured indefatigably, and plainly proved his ability by taking prize after prize, beginning with a silver medal in 1843, and ending, in 1847, with the gold medal for a historical picture, _The Tribe of Benjamin seizing the Daughters of Shiloh_. Subjects of this type seem at that time to have attracted him strongly, and to have occupied a great deal of his attention, for in 1846 he had painted, and exhibited at the Academy, _Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru_, which is now in the South Kensington Museum, and in the following year another study of violent action, _Elgiva seized by Order of Archbishop Odo_. To 1847 also belongs the great design, _The Widow bestowing her Mite_, for the Westminster Hall competition, a canvas fourteen feet long by ten feet high, covered with life-size figures. Such an effort speaks well for the energy and ambition of a lad of eighteen, who could within the space of a few months carry out so vast an undertaking in addition to the _Elgiva_, and his gold medal picture. So far his progress had been, from the point of view of his elder contemporaries, very promising and satisfactory. He had proved himself to be possessed of unusual gifts; and apparently historical art was to have in him an exponent of rather a rare type, a painter who would carry on its traditions with some degree of vitality. But really he had only been feeling his way, and, not having had time as yet to analyse his inclinations, he had temporarily accepted, with youthful imitativeness, the precepts of his teachers and fellow-students. It did not take him long to discover that he was on the wrong track, and to decide that there was in another direction a far better opportunity for the assertion of his own independent convictions. About the middle of the year 1848, he, and his friends Rossetti and Holman Hunt, inspired partly by the example of Ford Madox Brown, and partly by their own study of the works of the Italian Primitives who, before the time of Raphael, had laboured with devout and simple naturalism, decided that the principles which guided the early masters were being deliberately ignored by the modern men. So these three youths agreed among themselves to break away from most of the regulations by which they had been bound in their student days and to formulate a new art creed of their own. From this agreement sprang into existence an association, that, despite the small number of its members, and the shortness of its life, has left upon the history of the British School a mark clear and ineffaceable. THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD