before Raphael, is quite too wild for answer.[2] The name, however, is
of little consequence. The nature returned to is obviously, to any one
who has eyes in his head, the nature of the middle ages; and if our
readers will look again at the quotations we have made above--which
were not taken at random--they will find, in the words of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Vasari, and William Roscoe, a pretty accurate
description of the genius and manner of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Nor could the fact be otherwise. We have noticed the identity of taste
between the Chinese and the unawakened Europeans, as pointing to a
natural stage in art-development; and if we allot to the new school a
position one degree higher than that of Cimabue and Giotto, it is all
that can be claimed by artists, who have even attempted to dismiss
from their minds a later and nobler experience. Their rule is--to have
no rule; to copy nature, just as she happens to be before them; to
select nothing, reject nothing, subordinate nothing, and thus to have
no composition and no chiaro-scuro. They recognise no inequality, no
relationship of objects: a pin in a lady's dress, and the nose on the
lady's face, are treated with the same even-handed justice. The
harmony of colours is a mere dream: let them only be as bright as a
stained-glass window, and all is well.

At this moment, there are two specimens of Pre-Raphaelitism to be seen
at the Exhibition of the Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. They are both
distinguished, like the philosopher in Andersen's Drop of Ditchwater,
by having no name; but a quotation is appended to each of the numbers
in the catalogue, and is to be supposed to indicate, the subject. No.
9, in the Great Room, has this quatrain from Tennyson--

'She only said: "My life is dreary--