maturer years he was wont to speak admiringly of such poets as Dr. Gordon Hake and John Nichol, regarding the latter's Hannibal a peculiarly fine dramatic composition.

As to the personality of Dante Gabriel Rossetti much has been written since his death, and it is now widely known that he was a man who exercised an almost irresistible charm over most with whom he was brought in contact. His manner could be peculiarly winning, especially with those much younger than himself, and his voice was alike notable for its sonorous beauty and for a magnetic quality that made the ear alert whether the speaker was engaged in conversation, recitation, or reading. I have heard him read, some of them over and over, all the poems in the Ballads and Sonnets, and especially in such productions as The Cloud Confines was his voice as stirring as a trumpet tone; but where he excelled was in some of the pathetic portions of the Vita Nuova, or the terrible and sonorous passages of L' Inferno, when the music of the Italian language found full expression indeed. His conversational powers I am unable adequately to describe, for during the four or five years of my intimacy with him he suffered too much from ill health to be a consistently brilliant talker, but again and again I have seen instances of those marvellous gifts that made him at one time a Sydney Smith in wit and a Coleridge in eloquence. In appearance he was if anything rather over middle height, and, especially latterly, somewhat stout; his forehead was of splendid proportions, recalling instantaneously to most strangers the Stratford bust of Shakespeare; and his gray-blue eyes were clear and piercing, and characterised by that rapid

penetrative gaze so noticeable in Emerson.

He seemed

always to me an unmistakable Englishman, yet the Italian element was frequently recognisable; as far as his own opinion is concerned, he was wholly English. Possessing a thorough knowledge of French and Italian, he was the fortunate appreciator of many great works in their native language, and his sympathies in religion, as in literature, were truly catholic. To meet him even once was to be the better of it ever after; those who obtained his friendship cannot well say all it meant and means to them; but they know that they are not again in the least likely to meet with such another as Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

Having had little to do during his life with Royal Academies or Public Exhibitions, this brief introductory chapter on the personal history of Dante Rossetti may fitly be closed by extracts from the voluntary acknowledgments of two well-known art corporations.

Sir Frederick Leighton, as President of the Royal Academy, remarked in his Banquet-speech :

"I cannot pass on to lighter topics without allusion to the loss, within the year, of two most noteworthy artists who did not sit within our fold. One was John Linnell, etc. etc. The other was a strangely interesting man, who, living in almost jealous seclusion as far as the general world was concerned, wielded nevertheless at one period of his life a considerable influence in the world of Art and Poetry-Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter and poet. A mystic by temperament and right of birth, and steeped in the Italian literature of the mystic age, his works in either art are filled with a peculiar fascination and fervour, which attracted to him from those who enjoyed his intimacy a rare degree of admiring devotion. Such a man could not leave the world unnoticed here, and I am glad to think it is within these walls that the public will see next winter a selection of the works of these artists whom the Academy did not count among her members."

At the last April meeting of the Royal Scottish Academy the following record was made on the minutes:

"The Council have heard with much regret of the death on Sunday last of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose many-sided and original genius and high accomplishments, not only as a painter but as a poet also, have shed a lustre on the artistic profession. From his supersensitive aversion to 'exhibitions,' his thoughtful and imaginative pictures are but little known to the general public; but his influence on contemporary English art has confessedly been very great, while that of his poetry has been more widely and markedly felt. Probably few artists of more distinct individuality and intellectual force ever appeared; and his removal in the full maturity of his power cannot but be regarded as a heavy loss to art and literature."

CHAPTER II.

THE PRERAPHAELITE IDEA-THE GERM.

No action, however seemingly individual, springs from an original personal impulse alone. The greatest men of genius-Eschylus, Plato, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare-do not stand forth in their respective generations as deviators from the intellectual life of their fellow-men, with an antecedent as well as contemporary separation-but are each the outcome of circumstance. Dante is not so absolutely individual as to seem to us detachable from his time: he was led up to through generations of Florentine history. There is no such thing as an absolute independency of antecedents; and what is true of the individual is true of any movement in the intellectual or social evolution of man. By the way in which the movement known as the Preraphaelite has been and is even yet spoken of, it would seem to be regarded by many as a mere eccentric aberration from orthodox methods, sprouting up irresponsibly and unexpectedly, and with the sudden sterile growth of the proverbial mushroom. But that this is far from being the case any one having any real knowledge of our antecedent art and literature will know well: that it could not be the case will at once be recognised by any student of historic evolution.

The latter half of the nineteenth century has been fitly called the English Renaissance. But this term would be quite out of place if applied only to the outcome of Preraphaelite principles; for the spirit of change has been at work not only in one or two arts, and amongst but a small band of enthusiasts, but in all the arts, in social life and thought, in science, and in political development, and amongst all the foremost men of the day-scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, religionists, and politicians. Indeed, to say the breath of change has passed over our time is not sufficiently adequate, for if we contrast the present with so late a period as thirty years ago we will perceive that there has been nothing short of a national awakening. The national mind, as represented by the great mass of intelligent fairly cultivated people, may be likened to the very sunflower the ultra-æstheticists have brought into such disrepute, turning towards a light of which the need is felt-the same light, whether it is the Beautiful of the artist and poet, the Truth of the philosopher, or the Higher Morality of the teacher and the priest. In religion, and in what is now called sociology, as well as in literature, the first stirrings of this awakening spirit appear unmistakably, if faintly, towards the close of the last century. Before Byron and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth there was "something in the air," the first indefinite revulsion from the bugbear of an effete pseudo-classicism; such a pseudo-classicism as received in France its deathblow on a certain evening in February 1830, when Hernani was the victorious standard of the Romanticists. But as these stirrings grew and grew the hearts of men of true genius took fire with a new