lf-starved, hideous
wretch, with hardly a trace of the human anatomy in his composition;
and the other, a respectable and rather sagacious-looking person, with
immeasurable legs. Behind the bench is a frightful old woman, of the
lowest class; and before it another, younger, but repulsively ugly and
vulgar, examining, in conjunction with the respectable workman--and
with her brow knotted in an awful congeries of wrinkles up to her
fiery hair--the hand of a little boy. This little boy, though plebeian
and red-haired, is not unpleasing: he has apparently cut his hand
while playing with some of the edge-tools lying about the shop; while
his brother, a better-figured as well as better-behaved boy, with a
hairy apron round him, is making himself useful in carrying a basin of
some dark-coloured stuff--probably carpenter's glue. But let us see
what the legend attached to the number says: 'And one shall say unto
him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those
with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.'--Zechariah,
xiii. 6. What does this mean? It means, innocent reader, that the
piece we have described in its principal features is the Holy Family
of the Pre-Raphaelites! This is their mode of going to nature,
selecting nothing but the mean and repulsive, and rejecting nothing
but poetical and religious feeling and common decency.

But if the theory of the Pre-Raphaelites is just as regards painting,
it must be just as regards the other departments of taste. Suppose it
applied to musical composition. Let us throw overboard everything that
degrades music to a science, and 'go to nature,' as Mr Ruskin
counsels, 'rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning
nothing.' What would be the result? The result would be the torture of
everybody in the country who had the misfortune to possess a
cultivated ear. And yet the music of that time would not be absolutely
disagreeable in itself: it would merely involve the deprivation of
what had become a necessary to the taste; for nature would still
inspire simple sounds, connected more or less with the feelings.
Nature, in fact, proceeds in music upon laws that are merely
elaborated and carried out by science; while in painting, she offers
an endless variety of objects and effects, to be selected, grouped,
and made into a picture by the artist. We all feel this when gazing on
natural scenery. We are actuated by an unconscious eclecticism, and
make the compo