t part, confine them to mere foreground work; and
singularly enough, that they may not be tempted away from this work,
they have been born with comparatively little enjoyment of those
evanescent effects and distant sublimities which nothing but the memory
can arrest, and nothing but a daring conventionalism portray. But for
this work they are not now needed. Turner, the first and greatest of the
Pre-Raphaelites, has done it already; he, though his capacity embraced
everything, and though he would sometimes, in his foregrounds, paint the
spots upon a dead trout, and the dyes upon a butterfly's wing, yet for
the most part delighted to begin at that very point where the other
branches of Pre-Raphaelitism become powerless.

135. Lastly. The habit of constantly carrying everything up to the
utmost point of completion deadens the Pre-Raphaelites in general to the
merits of men who, with an equal love of truth up to a certain point,
yet express themselves habitually with speed and power, rather than with
finish, and give abstracts of truth rather than total truth. Probably to
the end of time artists will more or less be divided into these classes,
and it will be impossible to make men like Millais understand the
merits of men like Tintoret; but this is the more to be regretted
because the Pre-Raphaelites have enormous powers of imagination, as well
as of realization, and do not yet themselves know of how much they would
be capable, if they sometimes worked on a larger scale, and with a less
laborious finish.

136. With all their faults, their pictures are, since Turner's death,
the best--incomparably the best--on the walls of the Royal Academy; and
such works as Mr. Hunt's "Claudio and Isabella" have never been rivaled,
in some respects never approached, at any other period of art.

This I believe to be a most candid statement of all their faults and all
their deficiencies; not such, you perceive, as are likely to arrest
their progress. The "magna est veritas" was never more sure of
accomplishment than by these men. Their adversaries have no chance with
them. They will gradually unite their influence with whatever is true or
powerful in the reactionary art of other countries; and on their works
such a school will be founded as shall justify the third age of the
world's civilization, and render it as great in creation as it has been
in discovery.

137. And now let me remind you but of one thing more. As you examine
into the