"Charley" Collins, as his friends affectionately called him, was the son of a respected R.A., and the brother of Wilkie Collins; himself afterwards the author of a delightful book of travel in France, "A Cruise upon Wheels." Millais turned out to be the most gifted, charming and handsome of young artists.

Holman Hunt was already a Ruskin-reader, and a seeker after truth, serious and earnest in his religious nature as in his painting.
The Pre-Raphaelites were not, originally, Ruskin's pupils, nor was their movement, directly, of his creation.

But it was the outcome of a general tendency which he, more than any man, had helped to set in motion; and it was the fulfilment, though in a way he had not expected, of his wishes.
His attraction to Pre-Raphaelitism was none the less real because it was sudden, and brought about partly by personal influence.

And in re-arranging his art-theory to take them in, he had before his mind rather what he hoped they would become than what they were.

For a time, his influence over them was great; their first three years were their own; their next three years were practically his; and some of them, the weaker brethren, leaned upon him until they lost the command of their own powers.