a mistake to suppose, because the called themselves
Praeraphaelites, that they seriously disliked the works produced by
Raphael; but they disliked the works produced by Raphael's uninspired
satellites, and were resolved to find out, by personal study and
practice, what their own several faculties and adaptabilities might
be, without being bound by rules and big-wiggeries founded upon the
performance of Raphael or of any one. They were to have no master
except their own powers of mind and hand, and their own first-hand
study of Nature. Their minds were to furnish them with subjects for
works of art, and with the general scheme of treatment; Nature was to
be their one or their paramount storehouse of materials for objects
to be represented; the study of her was to be deep, and the
representation (at any rate in the earlier stages of self-discipline
and work) in the highest degree exact; executive methods were to be
learned partly from precept and example, but most essentially from
practice and experiment. As their minds were very different in range
and direction, their products also, from the first, differed greatly;
and these soon ceased to have any link of resemblance.

The Praeraphaelite Brothers entertained a deep respect and a sincere
affection for the works of some of the artists who had preceded
Raphael; and they thought that they should more or less be following
the lead of those artists if they themselves were to develop their
own individuality, disregarding school-rules. This was really the sum
and substance of their "Praeraphaelitism." It may freely be allowed
that, as they were very young, and fired by certain ideas impressive
to their own spirits, they unduly ignored some other ideas and
theories which have none the less a deal to say for themselves. They
contemned some things and some practitioners of art not at all
contemptible, and, in speech still more than in thought, they at
times wilfully heaped up the scorn. You cannot have a youthful rebel
with a faculty who is also a model head-boy in a school.

The P.R.B. was completed by the accession of three members to the
four already mentioned. These were James Collinson, a domestic
painter; Frederic George Stephens, an Academy-student of painting;
and myself, a Government-clerk. These again, when the P.R.B. was
formed towards September 1848, were all young, aged respectively
about twenty-three, twenty-one, and nineteen.

This Praeraphaelite Brotherhood was