Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 8 October 1849

This letter to DGR's brother is important not only because of the five DGR sonnets it includes, but for DGR's commentary at the beginning of the letter on WMR's important poem “Mrs. Holmes Grey”. The sonnets included here are: “The Staircase of Notre Dame, Paris”; “Place de la Bastille, Paris”; “To the P. R. B.”, “For a Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione (in the Louvre)” , and “The Can-Can at Valentino's”. Only the second and the fourth were published by DGR, the others being first printed by WMR in his posthumous collections. The text in this letter of the last of these sonnets is the only complete text we have. When WMR later published this work he carefully edited out its coarse passages, which he marked in the manuscript with square brackets.