after the Brotherhood fell apart, especially in William Morris's
application of their art-principles to household decoration and
furnishings. But for the time the movement was loudly mocked and
decried, and perhaps all the more because of Ruskin's espousal of the
fervid band, his letters of defence in the London "Times," and his
discussion in his booklet on "Pre-Raphaelitism." Heedless of the outcry,
Ruskin pursued his own self-confident course, and by the year 1860 he
had completed his "Modern Painters," and, in spite of objurgation and
detraction, had won a great name for himself as a critic and expounder,
while expanding himself over almost the whole world of art.

We have said that Pre-Raphaelitism, as a movement in art, was
contemporaneously jeered at; while to-day, among superficial or
inappreciative students of the period, seriously to mention it or any of
its cultured brotherhood is to provoke a smile. Nevertheless, there was
not a little high merit in the movement, which Ruskin was keen-eyed and
friendly enough to recognize, while much that is worthy afterwards came
out of it in the later work of the more notable of its members as well
as in that of their unenrolled associates and the admirers of the
Pre-Raphaelite method. What the movement owed to Ruskin is now frankly
conceded, in the lesson the brotherhood took to heart from his
counsellings,--to divest art of conventionality, and to work with
scrupulous fidelity and sincerity of purpose. Nor was contemporary art
alone the gainer by the movement; it also had its influence on poetry,
though this has been obscured--so far as any beneficial influence can be
traced at all--by the tendency manifested in some of the more amorous
poetic swains of the period, who professed to derive their inspiration
from the Brotherhood, to identify themselves with what has been styled
the "Fleshly School" of verse. Of the latter number, Swinburne, in his
early "Poems and Ballads," was perhaps the greatest sinner, though