unravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lines
everywhere, one or two modern examples much nearer to our own time may
roughly serve to illustrate. Take, for instance, the friendship that
developed itself between the youthful Bonington and the youthful
Delacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre: the
one communicating to the other something of the stimulating quality, the
frankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished the
English from the French school; the other contributing to shape, with
the fire of his romantic temperament, the art of the young Englishman
who was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of the
P.R.B.--Millais, Rossetti, and Mr. Holman Hunt--who is to state _ex
cathedra_ where influence was received, where transmitted; or whether
the first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time of
their complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, the
third the conscience of the group? A similar puzzle would await him who
should strive to unravel the delicate thread which winds itself round
the artistic relation between Frederick Walker and the noted landscapist
Mr. J.W. North. Though we at once recognise Walker as the dominant
spirit, and see his influence even to-day, more than twenty years after
his death, affirmed rather than weakened, there are certain
characteristics of the style recognised and imitated as his, of which
it would be unsafe to declare that he and not his companion originated
them.

In days of artistic upheaval and growth like the last years of the
fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the _milieu_
must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who most
influence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeply
rooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not be
doubted that when in Giorgione's breast had been lighted the first