Turner himself deemed the ‘Temeraire’ one of his best pictures, and from the beginning intended to bequeath it to the National Gallery, refusing to sell it for any price whatever.

  There’s a far bell ringing,
  At the setting of the sun,
  And a phantom voice is singing
  Of the great days done. 
  There’s a far bell ringing,
  And a phantom voice is singing
  Of renown for ever clinging
  To the great days done.

Now the sunset breezes shiver, Temeraire!  Temeraire! And she’s fading down the river, Temeraire!  Temeraire! Now the sunset breezes shiver, And she’s fading down the river, But in England’s song for ever She’s the ’Fighting Temeraire.’[4]

[Footnote 4:  The Fighting Temeraire.  Henry Newbolt.]

CHAPTER XV

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Since we began our voyagings together among the visionary worlds of the great painters, five hundred and thirty years ago, at the accession of King Richard II., we have journeyed far and wide, trudging from the rock where Cimabue found the boy Giotto drawing his sheep’s likeness.  The battleship of Turner has now brought us to the mid-nineteenth century, a time within the memories of living men, and still our journey is not ended.

Hitherto we have been guided in our general preference for certain artists and certain pictures by the concurring opinion of the best judges of many successive generations.  But while we are looking at modern paintings, we cannot say, as some one did, that in our opinion, ‘which is the correct one,’ such and such a picture is worthy to rank with Titian.  The taste of one age is not the taste of another.  Who can surely pronounce the consensus of opinion to-day?  Who can guess if it will concur with that of future decades—­of future centuries?  We can but hope that learning to see and enjoy the recognized masterpieces of the past will teach us what to like best among the masterpieces of the present.

A great love of the Old Masters inspired the work of a group of young artists, who, about the year 1850, banded themselves together into a society which they called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  The title indicates their aim, which was to draw the inspiration of their art from the fifteenth-century painters of Italy.  The sweetness of feeling in a picture such as Botticelli’s ‘Nativity,’ the delicacy of workmanship and beautiful painting of detail in Antonello’s ’St. Jerome’ and other pictures of that date, had an irresistible fascination for them.  They fancied and felt that these artists had attained to the highest of which art was capable, so that the best could only again be produced by a faithful study of their methods.  The aims of the Brotherhood were not imitation of the artists but of the methods of the past.  They held that every painted object, and every painted figure should be as true as it could be made to the object as it actually existed, rather than to the effect produced upon the eye, seeing it in conjunction with other objects.