Entirely original, if that quality could be predicated of any artist, he certainly was not, and he borrowed of his predecessors to an immense extent, not slavishly but adaptingly, and what he borrowed he proved a good right to, for he used it with a high intelligence and to admirable effect.

It seems to me that though he added little or nothing to the resources of art, as Rossetti undoubtedly did, he employed the precedents of past art, and especially of the Italian renaissance, to better effect than any other artist of our epoch; and, in borrowing as he did, he only followed the example of most of the great old masters, who used material of any kind found in their predecessors' works, in perfectly good conscience.
His industry was prodigious, and his devotion to art supreme..