it. He was old and past his executive prime. There were
some other highly able men--Etty and David Scott, then both very near
their death; Maclise, Dyce, Cope, Mulready, Linnell, Poole, William
Henry Hunt, Landseer, Leslie, Watts, Cox, J.F. Lewis, and some
others. There were also some distinctly clever men, such as Ward,
Frith, and Egg. Paton, Gilbert, Ford Madox Brown, Mark Anthony, had
given sufficient indication of their powers, but were all in an early
stage. On the whole the school had sunk very far below what it had
been in the days of Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Blake, and
its ordinary average had come to be something for which commonplace
is a laudatory term, and imbecility a not excessive one.

There were in the late summer of 1848, in the Schools of the Royal
Academy or barely emergent from them, four young men to whom this
condition of the art seemed offensive, contemptible, and even
scandalous. Their names were William Holman-Hunt, John Everett
Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painters, and Thomas Woolner,
sculptor. Their ages varied from twenty-two to nineteen--Woolner
being the eldest, and Millais the youngest. Being little more than
lads, these young men were naturally not very deep in either the
theory or the practice of art: but they had open eyes and minds, and
could discern that some things were good and other bad--that some
things they liked, and others they hated. They hated the lack of
ideas in art, and the lack of character; the silliness and vacuity
which belong to the one, the flimsiness and make-believe which result
from the other. They hated those forms of execution which are merely
smooth and prettyish, and those which, pretending to mastery, are
nothing better than slovenly and slapdash, or what the P.R.B.'s
called "sloshy." Still more did they hate the notion that each artist
should not obey his own individual impulse, act upon his own
perception and study of Nature, and scrutinize and work at his
objective material with assiduity before he could attempt to display
and interpret it; but that, instead of all this, he should try to be
"like somebody else," imitating some extant style and manner, and
applying the cut-and-dry rules enunciated by A from the practice of B
or C. They determined to do the exact contrary. The temper of these
striplings, after some years of the current academic training, was
the temper of rebels: they meant revolt, and produced revolution. It
would be