with his sisters.  Brown had, of the purely artistic qualities, only the academic; he was neither a colorist nor a great draughtsman; his art was literary, didactic, and, except for occasional dramatic passages, unemotional and unpoetic.  The predominance of the intellectual powers in him was so great that the purely artistic view of nature was impossible to him; and his artistic education, while curiously erratic and short-sighted in its elementary and technical stage, was intellectually large in academic and literary qualities, and comprehensive.  It appears to me that the telling of the story was, in his estimation, the highest office of art, so that, while his drawing was bad in style, his execution scrappy and amateurish and deficient in breadth and subordination, his compositions were often masterly, fine in conception, and harmonious in line, in the pen-and-ink study; but the want of ensemble and the insubordination of the insistent detail generally made his work less imposing when it was on canvas than in the first study.  His habit of finishing from corner to corner, without having the whole work broadly laid out before him to guide him in the proper subordination of the details to the general effect, made it impossible for him to make his pictures broad and effective.  His most successful pictures were, therefore, the small ones, in which the impossibility of too much insistence on detail proved an advantage.

I shall always regard Brown as a man carried by a youthful enthusiasm for art out of his true occupation, which was history; for his literary and scientific tendencies and his vehement love of truth were the larger part of his mind, and these qualities are of secondary importance in art.  He sympathized strongly with the early phase of the pre-Raphaelite movement, which was what he had attempted with less intensity himself; but when Rossetti entered upon his true artistic development, it was only the personal influence of the past that gave the elder painter any power of influencing the younger.  It is possible that Rossetti owed something of his manner of painting—­a fragmentary method of completion—­to the teaching of Brown; if so, he was indebted to his friend for the weakest side of his art.  But, for the rest, this system of working is very general amongst English painters, in whom the amateur is persistent—­the building the picture up in detail, with minor reference to the mass of the structure; and this was the weakness of Brown’s art, for what he did was done with such intensity that no after treatment could bring it into complete subordination to the general effect.  Theodore Rousseau’s maxim, “If you have not got your picture in the first five lines you will never get it,” seems to me the true golden rule of the art of painting, as in all creation.  A picture should grow pari passu in all its parts; otherwise there is no certainty of its keeping together when finished.