ROSSETTI 



ROSSI 



815 



study of painting. Besides some juvenile work, 

 and some translations from the German (that of 

 Henry the Leper, by the mediaeval poet, Hartmann 

 von der Aue, is preserved ), he executed a number 

 of translations from Dante and other Italians, 

 published in 1861 as The Early Italian Poets, and 

 again in 1874 as Dante and his Circle. Two of 

 liis best-known original poems, The Portrait and 

 The Blessed Damozel, were written in his nineteenth 

 year, and many others followed. These were 

 about to be published in 1862 in a volume (some of 

 them having been previously printed in magazines 

 chiefly in The Germ, 1850, and The Oxford and 

 Cambridge Magazine, 1856), but a domestic 

 calamity intervened, and all idea of publication 

 was set aside for some years. Rossetti had fallen 

 in love towards 1851 with a very beautiful girl, a 

 dressmaker's assistant, named Elizabeth Eleanor 

 Siddal ; he married her in 1860, but she died sud- 

 denly in February 1862. In the first impulse of 

 desperation he buried his MSS. in her coffin. In 

 1869 he thought lit to recover them, and in 1870 he 

 issued his volume named Poems, containing the 

 bulk of those compositions and several others 

 written not long before the date of publication. 

 Tlds volume was a success with poetical readers, 

 and was reviewed with great admiration and even 

 enthusiasm by some leading critics. Late in 1871, 

 however, Mr Robert Buchanan, writing in the 

 Contemporary Review under the pseudonym of 

 Thomas Maitland, attacked the book on literary, 

 and more especially on moral grounds, and soon 

 afterwards he republished his article, The Fleshly 

 School of Poetry, as a pamphlet. Rossetti was 

 now in a depressed state of health, suffering 

 much from insomnia, from an abuse of chloral as a 

 palliative, and from weakened eyesight (he often 

 thought he would become blind, as his father had 

 very nearly been). The literary detraction, con- 

 spiring with physical malady, produced a strong 

 and exaggerated effect upon him ; and from about 

 the middle of 1872 he became morbidly sensitive 

 and gloomy, and very recluse in his habits of life, 

 though his naturally strong sense, and his turn of 

 mind, in which a good deal of humour and practic- 

 ality was blended with idealism, continued to form 

 a substantial counterbalance. In 1881 he pub- 

 lished a second volume of poems named Ballads 

 innl Sonnets (containing some of his finest work, 

 'Kose Mary,' 'The White Ship,' 'The King's 

 Tragedy, 'and the completed sonnet-sequence, 'The 

 House of Life' ), and at the same time ne re-issued, 

 with some omissions and interpolations, the Poems 

 of 1870. His health was by this time extremely 

 shattered. A touch of paralysis ai"ected him 

 towards the end of 1881, and, retiring in the hope 

 of some improvement to Birchington-on-Sea, near 

 Margate, he died there of ura'inia on 9th April 

 18S2. The poetry of Rossetti is intense in feeling, 

 exalted in tone, highly individual in personal gift, 

 picturesque and sometimes pictorial in treatment, 

 ami elaborately wrought in literary form. These 

 characteristics are sometimes made consistent with 

 simplicity, but more generally with subtlety, of 

 emotion or of thought. As in his paintings, there 

 is a strong mediaeval tendency. It is now generally 

 allowed that Mr Buchanan's charges of immorality 

 against the writings were wide of the mark ; 

 indeed, he himself has admitted and proclaimed as 

 much. Rossetti was intimate at one or other 

 period of his life with many of the best men of 

 the day. In politics he took no part. His religious 

 views were vague at times negative enough ; 

 but he had a strong sense of reverence, and 

 a tendency to superstition rather than distinct 

 faith. In person he was of middling height, with 

 a handsome, expressive physiognomy, more Italian 

 than English. His portrait, a pencil-drawing 



executed by himself towards the age of eighteen, 

 is in the National Portrait Gallery. He was 

 generous, unthrifty, warm -tempered, clear-headed 

 but not discursive in habit of mind, very natural 

 and unaffected in manner, concentrated in aims 

 and modes of work. In almost all companies in 

 which he mixed he assumed and preserved a marked 

 ascendency, due to his exceptional faculty and un- 

 compromising tone of mind and character. 



CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI, younger 

 daughter of Gabriele and Frances Rossetti, was 

 born in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London, 

 on 5th December 1830. She was brought up 

 entirely at home under her mother's tuition, as 

 a member of the Anglican Church. She began 

 writing verse in early girlhood. Before she 

 was seventeen a little volume of her poetry was 

 privately printed by her maternal grandfather, 

 Gaetano Polidori, who kept a printing-press for his 

 own convenience at his residence in London. Her 

 publications are Goblin-Market and other Poems 

 (1862), The Prince's Progress and other Poems 

 (1866), Singsong (1872), A Pageant and other 

 Poems (1881); and, in prose, Commonplace and 

 other Stories (1870), Speaking Likenesses (1874), 

 Verses ( 1893), and a few devotional volumes, among 

 them Time Flies, a Beading Diary (with verses, 

 1885), and The Face of the Deep (on the Apocalypse, 

 1892). Most of her poenis were re-issued in 1890; 

 and after her death, her brother William undertook 

 a complete edition of her works. Miss Rossetti, 

 whose health was weak, died 29th December 

 1894. She had lived a very secluded life, 

 divided between devoted attention to her mother 

 (who died at a very advanced age in 1886), 

 and earnest religious thought and practice. In 

 direct poetic gift and intrinsic quality of poetry 

 she may be regarded as fully equal to her brother 

 Dante Gabriel, although the outcome is of a less 

 conspicuous kind. Her poenis have a singular 

 degree of grace, delicacy, and spontaneity, deep in 

 feeling, sensitive and certain in touch, and marked 

 by great purity of emotional thought, and by an 

 unfailing instinct of style. Several of her lyrics 

 have been set to music, and cantatas for two of the 

 longer poems Goblin-Market and Songs in a Corn- 

 field were composed by Aguilar and Macfarren. 

 See her Life by Mackenzie Bell (1898). 



A3 to Gabriele Rossetti, various critical articles regard- 

 ing him, more especially discussing or confuting his views 

 concerning Dante, &C., will be found in contemporary 

 periodicals, and in some volumes; the work of Aroux, 

 entitled Dante Heretique, RetohMonnaire, et Socialiste 

 (1854), is founded chiefly on Rossetti's researches, which 

 it presents in an exaggerated form. As to Dante 

 Gabriel Rossetti, see William Sharp, Dante Gabriel 

 Rossetti, a Record and Study (1882); Hall Caine, 

 Recollections (1882); Joseph Knight, Life of Dante 

 fiabrid Rosittti (1887; 'Great Writers' series); William 

 Rossetti, Dante Oabricl Rossetti as Designer and Writer 

 (1889); the article by Theodore Watts in the Encyclo- 

 pedia Britannica ; the monograph in the Portfolio by F. 

 < j. Stephens ( 1894 ) ; and the Memoir and Family Letters 

 (2 vols. 1895) by his brother William Michael (born 

 1829 ), author of the above article, who has also published 

 the following books : Dante's Comedy, the Hell, blank 

 verse translation (1865); Fine Art, chiefly Contem- 

 porart/ (1867); Lines of Famous Poets (1878); Life of 

 John Keats (1887); Shelley's Adonais, with Notes, &c. 

 (Clarendon Press, 1891); annotated editions of Shelley 

 and of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (2 vols. 1886), and other 

 writings. 



Rossi, PELLEGRINO, was born of a noble family 

 at Carrara, 13th July 1787. Hestudied at Bologna, 

 and was made professor of Law there at twenty- 

 five. Exiled after the fall of Murat, he obtained a 

 chair at Geneva, and there wrote his Trait/ 1 ne, 

 Droit Penal. In 1833 Louis-Philippe called him 

 to Paris, and appointed him professor of Political 



