Cinquecento, without rising above the level of intelligent plagiarism. As brilliant decorative artists possessed of pomp and majesty, and sensuously affected by plastic beauty, as worshippers of the nude human form, and as modern Greeks, the Italian classic painters were the worst conceivable guides for a people who in every artistic achievement have pursued spiritual expression in preference to plastic beauty. But in spite of the experiences gained since the time of Hogarth, they all went on the pilgrimage to Rome, as to a sacred spring, drank their fill in long draughts, and came back poisoned. Even Wilkie, that charming "little master," who did the work of a pioneer so long as he followed the congenial Flemish painters and the Dutch, even Wilkie lost every trace of individuality after seeing Spain and Italy. As this imitation of the high Renaissance period led to forced and affected sentiment, it also developed an empty academical technique. In accordance with the precepts of the Cinquecento, artists proceeded with an affected ease to make brief work of everything, contenting themselves with a superficial _façade_ effect. A painting based on dexterity of hand took the place of the religious study of nature, and a banal arrangement after celebrated models took the place of inward absorption. It was to no purpose that certain painters, such as _F. C. Horsley_, _J. R. Herbert_, _J. Tenniel_, _Edwin Long_, _E. M. Ward_, and _Eastlake_, the English Piloty, by imitation of the Flemish and Venetian masters, made more of a return from idealism of form to colour, and that _Edwin Armitage_, who had studied in Paris and Munich, introduced Continental influences. They are the Delaroche, Gallait, and Bièfve of England. Their art was an imposing scene painting, their programme always that of the school of Bologna--the mother of all academies, great and small--borrowing drawing from Michael Angelo and colour from Titian; taking the best from every one, putting it all into a pot, and shaking it together. Thus English art lost the peculiar national stamp which it had had under Reynolds and Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. It became an insignificant tributary of the false art which then held sway over the Continent, insincere towards nature, full of empty rhetorical passion, and bound to the most vacant routine. And as the grand painting became hollow and mannered, _genre_ painting grew Philistine and decrepit. Its innocent childishness and conventional optimism had led to a tedious anecdotic painting. It repeated, like a talkative old man, the most insipid tales, and did so with a complacency that never wavered and with an unpleasant motley of colour. The English school still existed in landscape, but for everything else it was dead. A need for reform became urgent all the sooner because literature too had diverged into new lines. In poetry there was the influence of the Lake poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had simplicity, direct feeling for nature, and a Rousseau-like pantheism inscribed as a device upon their banner, and it came as a reaction against the dazzling imaginative fervour of those great and forceful men of genius Byron and Shelley. Keats had again uttered the phrase which had before been Shaftesbury's gospel: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." In the year 1843 John Ruskin published the first volume of his _Modern Painters_, the æsthetic creed of which culminated in the tenet that nature alone could be the source of all true art. This transitional spirit, which strove for liberty from the academical yoke, though diffidently at first, is represented in painting by the Scotch artist _William Dyce_. In England he pursued, though undoubtedly with greater...