Like every other really great artist, he had a very just appreciation of the work of other men, and his criticisms were, _me judice_, very sound and broad from the point of view of art; the only painter of any note I ever heard him speak of with strong dislike was Brett, whom he could not tolerate.

But he had a higher opinion of his own natural abilities than of his actual achievement,--his self-appreciation was not the conceit of a man who understood only what he himself did, but a full consciousness of what at his best he would be capable of doing and hoped to do before he died.

In my opinion he understood himself and his merits justly, but he was to himself the centre of his own system; other stars might be as great, and probably there were many such, but they were remote, and judged in perspective.
He was undoubtedly the most gifted of his generation of artists, not only in England, where art is, if not exotic, at least sporadic, but in Europe, and I consider that if he had been of Titian's time he would have been one of the greatest of the Venetians.

His imaginative force and intensity were extraordinary, and some of the elaborate compositions he drew in pen and ink, for future painting, are as remarkable in invention and dramatic feeling as anything I know in art, and all drawn without a model.

The "Hector," the "Hamlet and Ophelia," the "Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee," are designs of unsurpassed power, eminent in all the great qualities of design, harmony of line, invention, and dramatic intensity.