t, by the chances of his own temperamental
many-sided delight in life and art, did something to reassure his
admonitors once more. No. 217 at the Royal Academy of 1862 was his
picture, _The Star of Bethlehem_, which, with some natural and not
unfair deductions, won considerable praise from the critic last quoted.
In this painting, which shows curiously the mingled academic and natural
quality of the artist, the critic found profound incompatibilities of
conception and technique; and next year, the same critic was stirred to
exclaim,--"The pictures which of all others give most trouble and
anxiety to the critic are perhaps those of Mr. Millais and Mr.
Leighton,"--a very suggestive conjunction of names, let us add.

It was probably the same critic, who speaking of the _Dante at Verona_,
in 1864, said gravely, "The promise given by the _Cimabue_ here reaches
fruition."

Writing in 1863, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, a critic whom it is interesting to
be able to cite, said of two of the artist's pictures of that year, the
_Girl feeding Peacocks_ and the _Girl with a Basket of Fruit_, they
belong "to that class of art in which Mr. Leighton shines--the art of
luxurious exquisiteness; beauty, for beauty's sake; colour, light, form,
choice details, for their own sake, or for beauty's."

In the same year, Mr. Rossetti spoke of the young artist as the one
"British painter of special faculty who has come forward with the most
decided novelty of aim"--since, that is, the new development of art
under the little band of Pre-Raphaelites,--with which Mr. W. M. Rossetti
was himself so closely associated.

By way of contrast, we may cite the "Art Journal" of 1865, which
provides a most extraordinary criticism of _David_, of that year. "We
would venture to ask," says this ingenious critic, "why the divine
psalmist has so small a brain? Within this skull there is not compass
for the poet's thoughts to range. We state as a physiological fact, that
a head so small, with a brow so receding, could not have belonged to any
man who has made himself conspicuous in the world's history. Again,
descending to mere matter of costume, there cannot be a doubt that the
purple mantle flung on the psalmist's shoulders is wholly wanting in
study of detail, and constitutes a blot on the landscape. Barring these
oversights, the picture possesses merits."

At this period we hear the first critical murmurs against the artist's
very deliberately chosen method of fles