lect have
burst so many of the loftiest souls the world has known,--from that mind
more inspired in its want of academic greatness, more self-educated in
its wild liberty, than the best-trained nations of Europe, this new
school has fittingly had its origin.

We speak of it as a School, though yet in its rudiments, because it
has a distinctive character, a real purpose,--and because it is the
embodiment of the new-age spirit of truth-seeking, of the spirit of
science, rather than that of song. Among the pictures contributed to the
English exhibition by the Pre-Raphaelites, there are very few which do
not convey the distinct impression of a determined effort to realize
certain truths. There are few which succeed entirely; but this is so far
from astonishing, that we have only to think that the oldest of these
artists has hardly passed his first decade of recognized artistic
existence, and that their aims are new in Art, to wonder that so much of
fresh and subtile truth is given. There are two respects in which nearly
all the works of the school agree, and which have come to be regarded by
superficial students of Art as its characteristics, namely, that they
are very deficient in drawing and devoid of grace. Both deficiencies
are such as might have been expected from the circumstances. Young men
filled with earnestness and enthusiasm, and with an artistic purpose
full in view, will spend little time in acquiring academic excellences,
or trouble themselves much with methods or styles of drawing. They dash
at once to their purpose, and let technical excellence follow, as it
ought, in the train of the idea of their work. Of course they do not
compare, as draughtsmen and technists, with men who have spent years in
getting a knowledge of the proportions of the human figure, and the best
methods of applying color; but, on the other hand, they are safe from
that most alluring and fatal course of study which makes the subject
only a lay figure to display artistic capacity on. Of all the pictures
of the school, in the collection of which we speak, there is but one of
academic excellence in drawing,--the "King Lear" of Ford Madox Brown.
All the others have errors, and some of them to a ludicrous degree; but
wherever refined drawing is needed to convey the idea of the picture, no
school can furnish drawing more subtile and expressive. The head of
the "Light of the World" is worthy in this respect to be placed beside
Raphael and Da V