ealise beauty, or, in other
words, to represent nature in the form she is striving, in her
infinite progression, to attain, but which as yet she only indicates
here and there in those hints and parts that prophetic genius combines
and moulds into a whole. He softened the harsh outlines, mellowed the
glaring colours, and harmonised the awkward proportions of mediaeval
art. With him, a new epoch commenced, adorned by many illustrious
names, from Julio Romano, the poet of painters, to Titian, who clipped
his pencil in the rainbow. The Lombard school of Titian was the third
of the three first great schools of the Revival, in which taste,
emancipated from the darkness of the middle ages, sought inspiration
in nature and the Greek sculptures. What would be thought if a school
were to arise three hundred years later, not merely discarding the
experience and teachings of the great masters, but claiming by its
very name to return into the gulf from which these had been
emancipated? This school of decline has, in fact, made its appearance
among the other symptoms of the mediaeval mania, and we now gravely
hang up in our exhibitions the productions of the _Pre_-Raphaelites!
The name at first provoked so much ridicule in England, that their
friends were at pains to inform the world, that it was assumed merely
for the purpose of intimating their entire separation from the
_schools_ of Raphael and his successors, and their exclusive devotion
to nature. The artists of Germany, however, with whom the mania
commenced, were less scrupulous.[1] They imitated, purposely, the
rudeness of the early painters, and even favourably distinguished the
juvenile works of Raphael when he was as yet the mere copyist of
Perugino. It is thus only the reformed schools the Pre-Raphaelists
avoid; for Mr Ruskin's notion, that there were no schools at all
before Raphael, is quite too wild for answer.[2] The name, however, is
of little consequence. The nature returned to is obviously, to any one
who has eyes in his head, the nature of the middle ages; and if our
readers will look again at the quotations we have made above--which
were not taken at random--they will find, in the words of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Vasari, and William Roscoe, a pretty accurate
description of the genius and manner of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Nor could the fact be otherwise. We have noticed the identity of taste
between the Chinese and the unawakened Europeans, as pointing to a
nat