Nicola and Maria Francesca Rossetti had a rather large family, four sons and three daughters, and three of the sons earned distinction. There was Domenico, who was versed (as a local historian records) “in medical science, in civil and canonical law, and in theology,” writing in Italian, Latin, French, and to some extent Hebrew, and was “the first among mortals who daringly descended into the Grotto of Montecalvo near Nice.” On this theme he wrote a poem in three cantos, besides other poems (two volumes, printed in Parma) and prose: he was besides an Improvisatore. Born in 1772, he died comparatively young in 1816. There was also Andrea, the eldest brother, who became a Canon of San Giuseppe in Vasto; and thirdly, Gabriele, whom I may be excused for regarding as a more important writer than even the polyglot Domenico. I might include, as showing that verse-writing ran in the family, the fourth son, Antonio, who exercised the humble calling of a wig-maker and barber: he likewise versified in an off-hand popular manner, and was of some note to his fellow-townsmen.

Gabriele Rossetti came into the world well endowed for the arts. As it turned out, he took to poetry and other forms of literature; but he might equally have excelled in drawing or in vocal music. I have before me as I write three MSS. containing specimens of his early skill as a draughtsman, done when he was twenty years old or thereabouts. The drawings are illustrations to poems (juvenile enough) of his own composition, and are surprisingly precise and dainty in execution. One would have little hesitation in calling them copper-engravings; but they are, in fact, pen-designs done with sepia, which he himself extracted from the cuttlefish or “calamarello,” so dear to Neapolitan gourmands. An ornamental headpiece, two decorative title- pages, and two landscapes founded on traditions of Claude or Gaspar Poussin, are his own inventions. One drawing is a group of two women after Mignard; and two or three others may also be copies. From my earliest childhood I have looked with astonishment on these performances as pieces of manipulation; and, after a lifetime spent among artists, I hardly know what to put beside them in their own limited line of attempt. Then, as to music, Gabriele had a beautiful tenor-voice, sweet and sonorous in a high degree. It received no regular cultivation, but was such that he was more than once urged to train himself for the operatic stage —a mode of life, however, for which he had no sort of inclination.

The local magnate was the Marchese del Vasto, of the great historic house of D'Avalos, into which the famous Vittoria Colonna married. He was feudal Lord of the Vastese, and they acknowledged themselves his “vassals,” though this state of things, in the epoch of a Robespierre and a Napoleon, was not destined to continue long. The attention of the Marchese was soon called to the uncommon promise of his growing-up vassal Gabriele Rossetti, and, after some well-conducted schooling in Vasto, the youth was sent in 1804, under the patronage of this nobleman, to study in the University of Naples. His education here was cut short after a year and a month, and consequently had not a very wide range. In middle life he read Latin with ease, and retained some remnant of geometry and mathematics, but of Greek he had no knowledge. In French he was well versed, speaking the language with great fluency and an amusing assumption of the tone of a Frenchman. English he acquired by practice in Malta and in this country, and could both read and talk it tolerably enough, though he never did so when he had the option of Italian.

Rossetti was just twenty-three years of age when the Bourbon king, Ferdinand I., was turned out of his continental dominion, and had to retire into Sicily, and Joseph Bonaparte reigned in his stead. With Ferdinand vanished the Marchese del Vasto, who was his Court-Majordomo. Thus all the years of Rossetti's early manhood were passed in association with a Napoleonic and not a Bourbon order of ideas. As a sequel to his first volume of poems, published in 1807, he obtained an appointment as librettist in the operatic theatre of San Carlo, writing three or more opera-books, one of them named . He was kept in hot water, however, by the exigencies of managers and vocalists, and got transferred to the Curatorship of Ancient Marbles and Bronzes in the Museum of Naples. He figured in the Academy of the Arcadi as “Filidauro Labidiense.” There used to be a catch,— “Rossini, Rossetti, Divini, imperfetti”; but whether my father was ever linked with Rossini in any operatic production I am unable to say. Rossetti was well received at the Court of King Joachim (Murat), the successor of Joseph. I have heard him say that he knew something of almost all the Bonapartes, except only the great Napoleon. I possess a slight portrait of him done by the Princess Charlotte Bonaparte; and another of the family, Lady Dudley Stuart, acted as godmother to his daughter Christina. In my own time Prince Pierre Bonaparte (too notorious as the homicide of Victor Noir) was frequently in our house; occasionally also Prince Louis Napoleon, the unduly glorified and duly execrated Napoleon III., of whom my father would emphatically declare that he could never trace in him one grain ( neppure un' ombra ) of Liberalism. King Joachim fell in 1815, and King Ferdinand was restored to his capital city, Naples; a state of things not likely to be much to the taste of Gabriele Rossetti—who in 1813 had acted as Secretary to that part of the provisional government, sent by Joachim to Rome, which looked after public instruction and the fine arts. He did not, however, under the restored Bourbon, lose his post in the Museum. An agitation ensued for a constitution similar to that which the Spaniards established in 1819—the secret society of the Carbonari, in which Rossetti was a member of the General Assembly, being especially active in this direction. In 1820 there was a military uprising, and Ferdinand had to grant the constitution —probably with a fixed intention of revoking it at the first opportunity. Rossetti's ode to the Dawn of the Constitution-day, “ ” (“Lovely art thou with stars in hair”), was in every Neapolitan mouth. In 1821 the king, then sojourning in Austria, abolished the constitution, and suppressed it with the aid of Austrian troops. Carbonarism was made a capital offence, and the leading constitutionalists were denounced and proscribed, among them Rossetti. He is said to have been viewed by the king with especial abhorrence, partly because various writings, not really his, were attributed to him, and partly because one of his lyrics contained the lines— “I Sandi ed i Luvelli Non son finiti ancor,” (Sands and Louvels are not yet extinct.) The reference, it will be perceived, is to the political assassination of Kotzebue by Sand, and of the Duc de Berri by Louvel, with a suggestion that a like fate might easily befall King Ferdinand. Rossetti did not say that it ought to befall him; but the king was not inclined to take a good-natured view of the matter, or to construe the phrase rather as a loyal warning than as an incitement to a deed of blood. The peccant poet lay concealed in Naples for three months, beginning in March 1821; finally the British admiral, Sir Graham Moore, pressed by his generous wife who knew and liked Rossetti, furnished him with a British uniform, got him off in a carriage to the harbour, and shipped him to Malta. I have before me a printed proclamation of King Ferdinand— the original document, dated 28 September 1822—granting an amnesty to persons concerned in the revolutionary or constitutional movement, with the exception of thirteen men expressly named. My father is the thirteenth. In Malta he remained about two years and a half, holding classes (as indeed he had previously done in Naples) for instruction in the Latin and Italian languages and literature, and most liberally befriended by the English poet and diplomatist, John Hookham Frere, the translator of Aristophanes: their amicable relations continued after distance had separated them. Deep indeed were the affection and respect which Rossetti entertained for Frere. One of my vivid reminiscences is of the day when the death of Frere was announced to him,1 in 1846. With tears in his half-sightless eyes and the passionate fervour of a southern Italian, my father fell on his knees, and exclaimed, “ Anima bella, benedetta sii tu, dovunque sei! ”2

Rossetti had long been a noted Improvisatore, as well as a poet in the accustomed way (he continued to improvise to some extent for a while, even after coming to London), and this, with his other gifts, made him popular in Maltese society. After a while, however, he was harassed by the spies or other emissaries of the Bourbon Government, which embittered his position so much that he resolved to have done with Malta, and settle in England. Here he arrived in January or February 1824, and fixed himself in London. He soon made acquaintance with the Polidori family, and a mutual attachment united him in marriage with the second daughter, Frances Mary Lavinia, in April 1826. He subsisted by teaching Italian, and held perhaps the foremost place in that vocation. In 1831 he was appointed Professor of Italian in King's College, London. This professorship was not a sinecure; but the students were few, and became fewer from about 1840 onwards, when the German language began decidedly to supersede the Italian in public favour. My

1 The person who announced it was Mr. Edward Graham, the associate of Shelley in early youth. He had taken to the musical profession, and was a man of uncommonly handsome presence: his bodily were superior to his mental endowments.

Polidori (as he intimates) had no taste for political convulsions, and little for politics of any sort. Almost immediately afterwards Alfieri got put out at finding that on a single occasion his secretary was not at home when summoned, and the Count wrote him a note, asking him “to change his style, or else his dwelling.” Polidori, one of the least pliable of mortals, closed at once with the second alternative, and determined to clear out of France, and repair to England to teach Italian. He asked for and readily obtained three letters of introduction from Alfieri and the Countess of Albany. These were addressed to Mrs. Cosway, the painter, Captain Masseria, a relative of Napoleon, and the famous Corsican General De' Paoli. The last remained up to his death on intimate terms with Polidori, and left him a mourning ring, which I now possess. In 1791 Alfieri, then in France, wished to get Polidori back as his secretary; but the latter declined with thanks, preferring conservative England very much to revolutionary France.

In February 1793 Polidori married Miss Anna Maria Pierce, who had acted as a governess. He taught Italian for a great number of years, retiring in 1836, after having made a fair moderate competence. He then lived for a while wholly in Buckinghamshire—Holmer Green, near Little Missenden, in a house which he had purchased years before for personal and family convenience—but in 1839 he returned to London, Park Village East, Regent's Park. There he died of apoplexy in December 1853, aged eighty-nine.

My anecdote about the wig-maker and the sword is taken from a little narrative which Polidori wrote, as an appendix to one of his privately printed books; for he kept a printing-press in Park Village East, and there he produced, with some aid from practical hands, several volumes of his own works, and a few others. Dante Rossetti's boyish poem , and Christina's , were among these—printed respectively in 1843 and 1847. Another was the poem by Erasmo di Valvasone, ; with passages extracted by Polidori from Milton's , presumably founded more or less upon this Italian poem. The personal narrative above mentioned relates chiefly to Alfieri, and contains several particulars of some interest. I give here a few of the general observations upon him: — “Curious and strange was the character of that singular man: proud as Milton's Satan, and more choleric than Homer's Achilles. He esteemed himself far beyond his real worth, and very few were the poets or men of letters for whom he had any regard. He was proud of his reddish hair, which he always wore studiously curled and tended; of his fine and speckless apparel, and especially of his uniform as a captain in the Piedmontese Infantry, which he donned for more solemn occasions; of his pure gold buckles for shoes and breeches, as then worn; of his handsome English horses, of which, counting together saddle and carriage horses, he had sixteen; and of his fine and elegant phaëton, which he generally drove four-in-hand, and went in pomp, taking the air in city and high-road. Yet, amid many defects, Count Alfieri had some good qualities: that of paying his debts most punctually, of limiting his outlay so that at the end of the year some money remained over, rather than be indebted for a penny, and of being just, when justice was clear to him. As I never had to dispute with him, in four years that I was in his house, save with the reason on my side, and, whenever we had disputed, he, upon recognizing that he was in the wrong, had confessed it and taken the blame to himself, I esteemed and loved him [various anecdotes had been previously given in the narrative, amply confirming this statement as to disputes between Alfieri and his secretary]. . . . In 1789 began the French Revolution, in which he exulted, and I saw him leap with joy upon the ruins of the Bastille.”

It is a matter of notoriety, however, that after a while Alfieri entirely altered his view of French affairs, and became a Gallophobist of prime virulence.

Polidori was a man of good stature and very vigorous build; his health was strong, and his faculties not seriously impaired by age. He liked almost any occupation—writing, reading, cabinet-work (he produced many pretty boxes, tables, etc., in wood-mosaic, after the Florentine manner), and miscellaneous country work. He was a man of the most sturdy and independent character, a sworn enemy to pretence and frivolity of all sorts; for instance, he would not allow any of his daughters to learn dancing. He always remained nominally a Roman-catholic, but without taking any part in religious observances of whatsoever kind. For his son-in-law Rossetti he had a sincere liking, and owned his great superiority to himself as a poet. But the divergence between them was frequently marked in little things: Polidori solid, unbending, somewhat dogged; Rossetti not any less earnest in essentials, but vivacious, facile, with more grace of manner and feeling, and comparatively mercurial. As a grandfather Polidori was both kind and tolerant, and was looked up to by us with much warmth of regard.

Gaetano Polidori had all the habits and likings of a literary man, and was more decidedly bookish than my father. Like the latter, he was a member of the Academy of the Arcadi, and bore the high-sounding designation of “Fileremo Etrusco.” I possess his Arcadian diploma, a curious document. He wrote a large number of things in prose and verse, both published, privately printed, and unprinted. His first work was a poem, (Faithlessness Punished). Among the others are— (Moral Tales); ; in three volumes, Italian with French and English, French with Italian and English, and English with Italian and French— a very handy little book, and no doubt no small labour to its compiler; ; , with a sequel of his own; . Unprinted is a , written in English, which my grandfather knew and spoke well. This MS. I possess; likewise an Italian , up to his return to Corsica during the French Revolution—a work which, considering Polidori's intimacy with his hero, might be of some worth.

As I have already said, the wife of Gaetano Polidori was Anna Maria Pierce; and I will now give some few particulars The period of the third to last complete sentence on this page has been omitted. about the Pierce family, which is, as will be perceived, the only source from which Dante Gabriel Rossetti had any English blood in his veins.

I know nothing of the Pierces beyond Richard Pierce, my great-great-grandfather, who was a schoolmaster in Burlington Gardens, London. He had a son, William, a writing-master, who maintained himself from the age of sixteen onwards, married twice, and had ten children. William Pierce (I referred to this at the beginning of the present Section) was born as far back as 1736; and it would appear that the vocation of a writing-master must in his prime have been far more lucrative than it is at present, for he made a very comfortable competence (the chief source of whatever money there has been in the family since his time), and “kept his carriage.” Possibly his first marriage (which seems to have been into a grade somewhat above his own) had to do with this result. He was always represented to me as a curiously well-preserved specimen of “the old school”; formal, precise, upright, rather formidable to a younger generation, yet kind too in his way. Among his grandchildren he had a special predilection for my mother; though like a good British Tory as he was, he thought it “very odd” that, after his daughter Anna Maria had married one foreigner, his grand-daughter Frances should marry another foreigner. It looked like flying in the face of the blessed shades of a Chatham, Wolfe, Nelson, and George III., and truckling to the far from blessed shades of a Voltaire, a Mirabeau, and a Bonaparte, not to speak of the Pope of Rome. Mr. Pierce had in fact a strong feeling against marriages with foreigners, as his favourite sister had made a marriage of this kind which proved very unhappy He died in 1829, aged ninety-three, shortly before my birth; and after him I was named William. His ten children, other than Mrs. Polidori, shall not concern us here; except to say that one of his sons, Frederick, became a Brigadier-General, and was highly esteemed, I believe, in the Army of India. I will also observe in passing that, through the first wife of William Pierce, Jane Arrow, and a brother and sister of hers, the present generation of Rossettis are some sort of cousins to that distinguished cleric, the Rev. J. E. Kempe, of St. James's Church, London, and also to the late Mrs. Eliza Anna Bray, whose first husband was a son of the painter Thomas Stothard. She published a , various romances, tales of Devonshire life, an , and other works. My uncle Henry Polydore once took the pains of drawing out a scanty pedigree of the Pierce and Arrow families; and I find in it, as connected by marriage, the surnames Wrather, Hunter, Maunsell, Le Mésurier, Jump, Lester, Porter, Hutchins, Mose, Kitchener, Austin, Cooper, Sandrock, and Brown (nothing to do with Madox Brown). These surnames—except Wrather, Austin, and Brown—represent nothing to my memory. Of the Austins I have some direct or collateral knowledge. There was a Bishop Austin in the West Indies, and an Austin Governor of Honduras; and in 1887 at San Remo I met a very pleasant young lady, Miss Burrows (now Mrs. Martin), who informed me that she was some connexion of mine—I believe through the Austin family.

As I have said, my great-grandfather, William Pierce, married a Miss Jane Arrow. My own knowledge of the Arrow family is of the scantiest; but I find it mentioned in Mrs. Bray's that James Arrow, the father of Jane, belonged to an old race, much damaged in the cause of Charles I. He had a small landed estate in Berkshire, and married an Irish lady, Elizabeth Jerdan, “related to the Whartons.” She died at the age of ninety-nine!

To return to Anna Maria Pierce, Mrs. Polidori, whom, as she lived on to May 1853, I remember perfectly well. Before my recollection begins she had already become an invalid, owing to an internal complaint, and she never left her bedroom, and not often her bed. Her youngest daughter, Eliza Harriet, was her constant and devoted attendant, sacrificing for this purpose all the pleasures and interests of youth. Mrs. Polidori was a fine old lady, with very correct features, and an air which, in spite of her age and infirmity, was comely as well as reverend. Her bed-room had to me all the dignity of a presence-chamber, which I entered at sparse intervals with a certain awe. She was, like several others of her race, a high Tory, and an earnest member of the Church of England; and the arrangement made at her marriage was that any daughters should be brought up in that Church, while any sons should belong to the Roman communion. It comes apposite to say here that in the Rossetti family the understanding was different, and all the children were trained in their mother's faith. Mrs. Polidori had attained her eighty-fourth year at the date of her death. The only other member of her generation of the Pierce family whom I knew was her elder sister Harriet, who, though unmarried, was always in my time styled Mrs. Pierce, and we children were admonished to term her “Granny.” After passing many years as governess in the family of the Earl of Yarborough, she spent the evening of her life in nice apartments in London, which she made a model of spick-and-span comfort, not unmixed with elegance. I have just now said that she was unmarried; but there ran a rumour, not totally uncorroborated, that Lord Yarborough had in fact wedded her without publicity. He had become a widower in 1813, and lived on to 1846. This rumour I of course in no sort of way avouch. “Granny” was the liberal purveyor of many a serviceable household-present to my mother, her favourite niece. She inherited all the faultless precision and imposing decorum of her father, and was the most nitid little old lady you could easily pick out in London. She died in 1849—the first time that I looked upon the visible face of death.

The Polidoris had a family of four daughters and four sons —one of the latter dying in infancy. In my notes to my brother's letters sufficient details will be given about three of these—Charlotte Lydia, Philip Robert, and Henry Francis (the latter modified his surname into Polydore). There remain the eldest daughter, Maria Margaret, and the youngest (whom I have just now mentioned), Eliza Harriet. Maria Margaret—or Margaret, as she was always called—was in her youth a governess, but retired pretty early, and lived with her family, and finally in my house, 166 Albany Street, where she died in 1867. She was much affected with nervous tremor, and troubled by hysterical fits, in which she would fall into peals of long-continued quasi-laughter, which rang over the house—more like the vocal gymnastics of a laughing hyena than like anything else I know. No other symptom of the hyena appeared about my aunt, who, apart from a touchy temper, was a good old soul, much addicted to “daily service” twice a day in church. The youngest daughter, Eliza Harriet, had always a housekeeping managing turn, without any literary leanings. In 1854, the year succeeding her mother's death, she determined to make her knowledge of nursing useful to the nation, and went out with Miss Nightingale to the Crimean expedition, being then about forty-five years of age. To her disappointment no actual nursing was assigned to her, but she had the supervision of the hired nurses, and the management of bedding-stores etc., at the Barrack Hospital, Scutari, and rendered excellent service, which was recognized by the bestowal of a Turkish medal. I remember that after her return to England some case relating to the nursing transactions came into a London police-court, and she had to give evidence; and we were amused at finding her, in the newspaper reports, designated as “Miss Polly Dory.” The Crimean affair was about the only “adventure” of her long life. She died in London in 1893, aged nearly eighty-four. Eliza was the last of the English Polidoris; some of the name are still in Florence.

Only one other Polidori has to be accounted for in my narrative—Dr. John William Polidori, who lives faintly in some memories as the travelling physician of the famous Lord Byron. He was born in London on 7 September 1795, educated at some Catholic schools and at the Benedictine Ampleforth College near York, and took his degree as M.D. in Edinburgh at the singularly youthful age of nineteen. He was only twenty when, on the recommendation of Sir Henry VOL. I. 3 Halford, he became the travelling physician of Byron, who on 24 April 1816 left England for the last time. They went along the Rhine to Geneva, where Polidori made acquaintance also with Shelley and his two companions, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (the second Mrs. Shelley) and Clare Clairmont. Polidori, who had poetical and literary ambitions of his own, took too much upon him to suit Byron for long; so on 16 September the two parted company, and the young Doctor travelled on alone to Pisa, and then returned to England. He became one of the physicians in the Norwich Hospital; but soon gave up medicine, partly because he would not have been allowed to practise in London before completing twenty-six years of age, and he began studying in London for the Bar. It has been said that in Norwich Miss Harriet Martineau was somewhat in love with him; and this would not be unlikely, as Polidori—apart from his intellectual gifts, which were by no means so flimsy as some people seem now to suppose—was a noticeably fine young man, of striking feature and presence. In August 1821 the end came in a melancholy way: he committed suicide with poison—having, through losses in gambling, incurred a debt of honour which he had no present means of clearing off. A coroner's jury was summoned; the jurors took, probably through good-nature towards the family, no steps for eliciting requisite evidence, and returned a verdict of “Died by the visitation of God.” His death was a grievous blow to his father, all whose leading hopes centred in this son. Gaetano Polidori, to the end of his long life, a lapse of thirty-two years, was never equal to hearing any mention of him, and we children of a younger generation were strictly warned not to name him, however casually, in our grandfather's presence.

John Polidori published two volumes of verse: , 1819; and , 1821. It may at once be admitted that his poetry was not good. Two prose tales are much better— , and , both published in 1819. has continually been misascribed to Byron, who in reality wrote the mere beginning of another tale (quite different in its incidents) named likewise . Polidori left some other writings, both published and unpublished. The latter include a diary, partly detailed and partly mere jottings, of his sojourn with Byron and Shelley, and his subsequent tour. It was commissioned by Murray for publication at no less a price than £525, and contains some particulars of substantial interest.1

I have no finished all that I need to say about the relatives of Dante Rossetti on the mother's side. The only relative on our father's side whom we have personally known—with some others I have corresponded—was Teodorico (or properly Teodoro) Pietrocola, who adopted the compound surname of Pietrocola-Rossetti. He was a Vastese, and studied medicine to some extent. In 1851, being then about twenty-four years of age, he came to London, hoping to find an opening of some kind; but found nothing except semi-starvation, which he bore with a cheerful constancy touching to witness. In 1856 or thereabouts he returned to Italy, practised for a moderate while medicine as a Homœopathist, married a Scotch lady (originally Miss Steele, now Mrs. Cole, an amiable, accomplished, and admirable woman), and, with her co-operation, devoted himself to preaching evangelical Christianity, somewhat of the Vaudois type, in Florence and elsewhere. He died very suddenly in 1883, just as he was giving out a hymn or text to his small congregation. He published a few things—among others, a biography of my father, a translation of , and one of Christina Rossetti's poem, . A man of more native unselfish kindliness, of stricter morals, or of nicer concientiousness, never breathed.

Since writing the above, I have observed in the book of Mr. W. G. Collingwood, , a reference to Pietrocola-Rossetti which is of so much interest

1 On the details about Shelley in this diary I wrote a few years ago, and delivered to the Shelley Society, a lecture which has not as yet been printed.

If English acquaintances were at a minimum with us, Italian acquaintances were at a maximum. It seems hardly an exaggeration to say that every Italian staying in or passing through London, of a Liberal mode of political opinion, sought out my father, to make or renew acquaintance with him; not to speak of numerous relays of tatterdemalions, who came principally or solely for alms. If they made the Masonic knock at the door, or a Masonic digital sign on entering, they were immediately relieved, as an act of obligation on the part of my father as a Freemason; and many were relieved who had no claim of that particular kind. There were two terms which I have heard my father apply—how often!—to persons of this class: “ un cercatore ” was an applicant or beggar, “un seccatore” was an intrusive person, or bore. Others, to whom these designations did not relate (though some of these also were manifest seccatori , and perhaps on occasion cercatori as well), would come evening after evening, and almost all evenings, to our house—in various instances, for months or years together. My father, as the offspring of a blacksmith in a country town, was not entitled to have any caste-prejudices, and in fact he had none. To be an Italian was a passport to his good-will; and, whether the Italian was a nobleman, a professional gentleman, a small musical hanger-on, a maccaroni-man, or a mere waif and stray churned by the pitiless sea of expatriation, he equally welcomed him, if only he were an honest soul, and not a spia (spy)—the latter being a class of men much rumoured of among the Italian refugees and Londoners, and abhorred with a loathing indignation. Hardly an organ-man or plaster-cast vendor passed our street-door without being interrogated by my father, “Di che paese siete?” (“What part of Italy do you come from?”) The plaster-cast vendor is seen no more in London streets, but the organ-man remains. The natives of the Sunny South who frequented our house seemed all to be indifferent— singularly indifferent, in British eyes—to any form of social entertainment; what they came for was talk—chiefly on political topics, mingled at moments with a little literature, and constantly with a liberal sprinkling of my father's poems, which were received with sonorous eulogy, founded at least as much on political or national as on literary considerations. Gabriele Rossetti's noble declamation, taken along with his subject-matter, was indeed enough to carry any sympathizer away on the wave and whirl of excitement. I seldom heard him read any of his prose-writings on such occasions. His auditors hardly appeared to have any fleshly appetites. Such a thing as a solid supper was never in question, neither did they ever propose to smoke. They would come into our small sitting-room, greet the “Signora Francesca” and their host, and sit down, as the chance offered, amid the whole family, adult and semi-infantine. A cup or two of tea or of coffee, with a slice of bread and butter, was all the provender wont to be forthcoming.

It would be difficult to give an idea of the atmosphere of thought and feeling in which Dante Rossetti grew to boyhood and to youth, unless I were to say something about the foreign visitors. I shall endeavour to be reasonably brief. Some he remembered a little, but I, his junior, scarcely or not at all. Such were Angeloni, a literary purist,1 who became blind in his last years; General Michele Carrascosa, who was my second godfather; the famous prima donna Giuditta Pasta; Guido Sorelli, who maligned in a book the character of Italian women, and was gibbeted by my father in a sonnet; Dragonetti, a leading violoncellist at the Italian opera; Petroni, compiler of a dictionary. The celebrated author Ugo Foscolo was barely known to my father in London; well known was the not less celebrated violinist Paganini. There was a Conte Farò, who took, I believe, to coal-dealing. “Farò” means in Italian “I will do”; and my father (possibly

1 Purism in the use of the Italian language was a great controversy among Italians in all those years. The purists insisted upon recurring to the standard of literary diction, mainly the Tuscan of the fourteenth century, to the exclusion of everything modern, provincial, or imported from abroad. Gabriele Rossetti cared little for such niceties, but was willing to write much as he thought and spoke. Polidori was stricter, yet not a purist.

The next immense favourite was Walter Scott. Some relative presented a pocket-edition of to Dante Rossetti at a very childish age. He ramped through it, and recited whole pages at a stretch—the death of Constance, the battle and death of Marmion, etc. Fitz-Eustace was regarded as a tame and correct-minded character rousing no interest. and excited fully as much delight as ; and only a little less. I can still recollect that one afternoon the junior master at our first school, the younger Mr. Paul, called at our house for some purpose, and found us all four racing and tumbling about the floor, repeating in semi-drama the Battle of Clan Alpin, from . Dante was then just about nine years of age. Along with Scott's poems the went on at a great rate; the old , and not long afterwards . ensued pretty soon after the poems— (the prime favourite), , , etc. It may perhaps be as well to give here the opinion which, at a mature age, Dante Rossetti entertained of Walter Scott's novels. It is expressed in a letter of October 1871, addressed to Mr. William Bell Scott:— “ I have read several of Scott's novels here, and been surprised both at their usual melodramatic absurdities of plot, and their astounding command of character in the personages by whom all these improbabilities are enacted. The novels are wonderful works, with all their faults. and —neither of which I knew before—delighted me extremely. Another I read is ; which is on a level with the Victoria drama in some respects, but, in some points of conception and vivid reality in parts, can only be compared to the greatest imaginative works existing. ”

These books—Shakespear, , Scott, and the —and, along with these, Keightley's (mentioned in a previous section), Monk Lewis's verse-collection ( , etc.), and the stirring ballad of —may certainly be regarded as the staple and the fine fleur of what Dante Rossetti revelled in up to the close of his tenth year or thereabouts. He always discerned the difference between the “Ghost in ” and a ghost by Monk Lewis. Other things are present to me as well: Carleton's , , , Gay's , (a tale translated from Dumas), Fitzgreene Halleck's short poem of an incident of the Greek War of Independence. Of Burns he had a kind of idea, through looking into an edition sparsely illustrated by Westall; but the dialect was a bar to his taking very kindly to the poems. Lamb's he skimmed and slighted. Of directly “funny” things I remember only and some jocosities of Hood in a . Naturally, too, there were the old nursery-rhymes in infantine years, and ; and the old Fairy-tales, such as , , , , , etc. Our mother kept us adequately supplied with books having a directly religious or didactic aim—stories about “good little boys and girls,” or the alternative naughty ones, and other such matter; but she, like a sensible woman, did not tie us down to liking them, in case we happened to dislike them—which we generally did. There were some of Miss Edgeworth's stories for children, such as ; Day's ; , by Mrs. Sherwood, which last we were far from relishing. The one which I recollect as best esteemed was , by Mrs. Hofland; a companion story was . A minute edition of , by James Mill, was very frequently in our hands, with prints —the Druids burning victims in wicker cages to their gods, Queen Margaret and the Robber, and so on.

Illustrated books and engravings were not very numerous in our house, but still in fair quantity. One that Dante and the rest of us looked at continually, beginning well nigh in infancy, was an old-fashioned little book (1700) in the Dutch language, named , by a painter (Goedaerdt), with coloured prints of insects and their transformations. Blank wonderment, with much of stimulating pleasure and something of repulsion, was the result. Later on, and never tired of, came ; and to his last day Dante would have told you that Martin was an imaginative pictorial genius of no mean power. Afterwards some one gave him a book of rather large outline engravings from Scripture, after the Old Masters—emptyish-looking things which he frequently inspected, with little real sympathy. I have always thought that his indifference to the respectable conventions of Old-Masterhood, leading on to the Præraphaelite movement, had something to do with this book. Our grandfather had at Holmer Green some engravings after Rubens, the subjects from the story of Achilles. They met his fancy in a certain way, but he did not like their fleshy forms and florid manner. Also (belonging probably to Eliza Polidori) a book of English engravings from Raphael's Cartoons, with highly laudatory descriptions. Another of our grandfather's possessions was a fine large edition of Ariosto, with French engravings of last century. These were an endless delight to Dante, from the age of eleven or so onwards. He owned much earlier, as a present from the same relative, a little book of French or Flemish woodcut-illustrations to Bible history, dating towards 1580. They were probably artistic things of their kind, and he enjoyed their arbitrary treatment and unreasonable costumes. Among our father's books were a ; Gombauld's , in English, with engravings, dated 1639; and a volume of pagan mythology with startling woodcuts of about the early seventeenth century—I presume it to have been the of Boccaccio. All these Dante inspected from time to time, with some gusto not unmingled with awe—each book being pronounced by our father to be a “ libro sommamente mistico ,1” according to his system of interpretation of mediæval and renaissance literature. In his opening years no prints were more frequently in Dante's hands than a series of lithographs from Roman history, the work of Filippo Pistrucci (there was also a different series, ); not very superior efforts of art, but far from being amiss in treatment of the subjects. At one time, after Dante had passed out of mere childhood, some one brought into our

1 Book in the highest degree mystical.

As a Professor in King's College, Gabriele Rossetti was entitled to send one son to the day-school there free of charge, and a second son at reduced fees. It had therefore always been intended that we boys should go to that school as soon as a little preliminary instruction had been gained at Mr. Paul's establishment; and thither accordingly we went after the midsummer holidays of 1837. Dante was rightfully admissible, having attained the regulation age of nine; I was not so, being not quite eight, but was allowed to pass muster. As this is a day-school (although a few pupils were housed as boarders), we went daily to and fro. At first we took the route by Regent Street and the Strand to Somerset House, but afterwards preferred the more plebeian, and to us more amusing, shops of Tottenham Court Road and St. Giles's (no New Oxford Street then existed). The Head Master was the Rev. Dr. Major, of whom, in Dante Gabriel's time, we saw little. The Principal was Dr. Lonsdale, Bishop of Lichfield. The school was then, as it is now, of strict Church-of England principle, and most of the masters were clergymen. On one or two occasions I saw prizes distributed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Howley—a little old man, still wearing the episcopal white wig, of the gentlest manner and address, almost apologetic to the students (so it seemed) for so far putting himself forward. He was—in regard at least to aspect and demeanour—anything but one of those vescovi pettoruti (bishops high in flesh) who were frequently in my father's mouth; for the latter disliked the worldly well-being and brow-beating respectability of the Anglican clergy only a little less than the arrogant bigotry of their Roman compeers. The great prize-receiver in those days was Arthur Cayley, the pre-eminent Cambridge Mathematician, who would come up for three or four successive prizes in one afternoon. His younger brother, Charles Bagot Cayley, was one of my father's pupils in Italian, and learned the language admirably, as shown by his fine translations of Dante and Petrarca—a most estimable scholarly man, without a taint of mundane self-seeking. I forget how many languages he knew. If he did not know one, he only had to learn it. He was once asked, by some missionary or other society, to translate the Gospels for the Iroquois. He went to the British Museum Library, looked up an Iroquois grammar or two, and, at the end of six weeks or so, he undertook the task, and performed it.

My brother and myself entered King's College School in the lowest class—the Lower First—of which the Rev. Mr. Hayes was the Master. Some schoolboy called him “Bantam,” from his red complexion and facial angle; and every other schoolboy followed suit. To us he was kind; and he perhaps stretched a point by returning our “characters,” in the first quarterly report, as “in every respect satisfactory” for Dante, and for myself “in the highest degree commendable.” Some other good reports of us may have followed, but certainly none so flowery as that.

Dante Rossetti's school-life at King's College lasted just five years, from the autumn of 1837 to the summer of 1842. He had no further schooling of any kind, except some German lessons taken at home, and his instruction for the pictorial profession. When he left school, he wrote an excellent hand; knew Latin reasonably well, up to Sallust, Ovid, Virgil, etc.; had the beginning of a knowledge of Greek, but I can hardly say whether, after a few years' interval, he could even read the Greek characters with any readiness; understood French well—well enough to begin forthwith, which he did, reading any number of French novels for himself; and had some inkling on subjects of history, geography, etc. He always saw easily into linguistic and grammatical matters, so far as he cared to pursue them. He had also been brought on a little in drawing, of a more or less sketchy kind. In the classes generally (but not in the drawing-class) the boys had to be seated in the order of their proficiency, one of them “taking the place” of another as occasion arose; and Dante was usually pretty near the head of a class. Of anything even distantly tending to science—algebra, geometry, etc.— he learned nothing whatever. The religious instruction at King's College School counted for little: there were some prayers and a chapter of the Bible in the morning. But all this time he continued going to church en famille , without much liking or any serious distaste. In early childhood came Trinity Church, Marylebone Road; then St. Katharine's, Regent's Park; then Christ Church, Albany Street.

I will run over a few other particulars—I hope, with due brevity. The Upper First Class was conducted by the Rev. Mr. Cockayne, who became—or possibly then was—a good scholar in Early English. The Second, by the Rev. Swinburne Carr, author of a serviceable . The Third, by the Rev. Mr. Hodgson, an ungainly little man whom the boys did not like. I cannot say that Dante or myself had any reason to complain of him. There was a legend that he knew very little about the matters on which he instructed the boys, and that he had to prepare his own lessons over-night. As to this I of course know nothing. In the Fourth Class, the last which Dante Gabriel entered, the Master was the Rev. Mr. Fearnley. Of him also a legend was current, purporting to account for a seam visible in his throat. It was really, I presume, a seam of a scrofulous nature; but the legend ran that he had once cut his throat with suicidal intention, and had only been saved at the last gasp. Mr. Fearnley, a large stalwart man, was considered severe, and the boys were not very fond of being promoted into his class—which may be a reason why some one concocted the legend. Each of these classes numbered some thirty boys, more or less; perhaps one or two of them attained to forty.

There were also the Writing and Arithmetic Masters, the French Masters, and the Drawing Masters. Mr. Allsop, the Head Writing Master, was a great adept in his craft, and would at times come round to one class or another displaying a chef d'œuvre of caligraphy, full of the most astonishing flourishes. He was odd, and left the school not long after we entered it; and I fear that the story I was told, that he had gone out of his mind, was a true one. His successor was a small old man, Mr. Hutton, of venerable grandfatherly aspect, with white hair. He was easily put out, and some of the boys, being as pitiless as other boys, put him out when they could. Dante held aloof from this indignity. The French Masters were Mm. Gassion and Wattez, and Professor Brasseur, all very competent men; the first two considerate to their pupils, and the third, who could be sarcastic as well as considerate, a scholar of some rank. He was afterwards French Preceptor to the Prince of Wales, and died at a recent date, aged, I think, about ninety. The Drawing Master was the most interesting personage of all—the celebrated member of the Norwich School of Painting, John Sell Cotman. He was aged fifty-five when Dante Rossetti entered King's College School—an alert, forceful-looking man, of moderate stature, with a fine well-moulded face, which testified to an impulsive nature somewhat worn and wearied. He seemed sparing of speech, but high-strung in whatever he said. In fact, the seeds of madness lurked in this distinguished artist, although, apart from a rather excitable or abrupt manner in ruling his bear-garden, I never noticed any symptoms of it. Pretty soon he left the school, and, just as Dante also was leaving it, in July 1842, he died insane. Mr. Cotman's course of instruction did not extend far beyond giving us pencil-sketches, often of his own, to copy—fisher-folk, troopers, peasants, boating, etc. Dante's copies were, I suppose, considered to count among the more satisfactory, but I am not aware that Cotman ever fixed particular attention upon him. As Drawing Master he was succeeded by his son, Miles Edward Cotman. The latter died in 1858, aged only forty-seven; and I fancy that he also, though perfectly quiet and collected in manner, was a little peculiar.

In Mr. Hall Caine's book— , 1882 — there is a passage which deserves quotation here:— “He is described, by those who remember him at this period, as a boy of a gentle and affectionate nature, albeit prone to outbursts of masterfulness. It is said that he was brave and manly of temperament, courageous as to personal suffering, eminently solicitous of the welfare of others, and kind and considerate to such as he had claims upon. This is no doubt true portraiture; but it must be stated (however open to explanation, on grounds of laudable self-depreciation) that it is not the picture which he himself used to paint of his character as a boy. He often described himself as being destitute of personal courage when at school, as shrinking from the amusements of school-fellows, and fearful of their quarrels—not wholly without generous impulses, but in the main selfish of nature, and reclusive in habit of life. He would have had you believe that school was to him a place of semi-purgatorial probation.” All this is put in a very fair spirit by Mr. Caine, and it merits a little reflection. No one now alive perhaps, except myself, could, with any clear knowledge and recollection, say whether Dante Rossetti was “destitute of personal courage when at school.” I do not consider that he was by any means thus destitute. I have seen him fight with a proper degree of tenacity when the occasion arose; but it is strictly true that he was “fearful of the quarrels” of schoolfellows, in the sense that he totally disliked that loutish horse-play and that scrambling pugnacity which are so eminently distinctive of the British stripling. The meaningless defiance, the bullying onset, and the mauling scuffle, looked to him ugly, base, detestable, and semi-human. If he was mistaken, I should Toward the end of the page, “be passed it off lightly” should read “he passed it off lightly”. like to know wherein. The bull-dog propensity to pin somebody by the muzzle, whether deserving to be so pinned or not, was not any part of his character, inborn or acquired. Neither had he any liking for being set up by his schoolfellows, without quarrel of his own, to fight a boy two or three inches taller than himself, and with half as much again in thews and sinews. That he was “in the main selfish of nature” is true when the statement is properly understood, but it might easily be misconstrued. He was selfish, in the sense of self-centred. His own aims, his own opportunities, the working-out of such faculty as he found within himself —these were always his chief concern. To term him “self-willed”—which he most eminently was from first to last— would give a much more correct idea than to term him “selfish.” He was not selfish in the sense of being dull in affection to others, indifferent to their welfare, or unwilling to exert himself to do them a benefit. He had a theory, which I have heard him express at various periods of life, that men who have an originating gift—or, in a broad sense, what we call men of genius—are all selfish in that same mood of being self-centred. He would say it of such poets as Dante, Milton, Göthe, Wordsworth, Shelley, or of Shakespear if the facts of his life were adequately known—of such painters and sculptors as Titian, Cellini, Rembrandt, Blake, and Turner. And here again I apprehend that he was remote from being wrong. That “school was to him a place of semi-purgatorial probation” is, I dare say, nearly true. It is a fact however that, if in reality he felt this at the time deeply, be passed it off lightly; for to me, who was his daily colleague and confidant, he never, so far as I can remember, unbosomed himself to any such effect. That contact with school-life did the reverse of good to the character of the boyish Rossetti is what I have already avowed. His regard for veracity, the strictness of his sense of honour, his readiness to brave inconvenience for principle, were subject to daily undermining; for the moral atmosphere around reeked too perceptibly of unveracity, slipperiness, and shirking. His temper too, which was always an arbitrary and peremptory one, did not improve; but he retained unimpaired two valuable qualities—an easy good-nature, and a facility at forgiving and forgetting. From infancy onwards he was always a great favourite with servants, shoe-blacking men, organ-grinders, and people of the like class. Brightness of parts and brightness of manner ensured this.

I have not yet referred to the statement reported by Mr. Caine about “shrinking from the amusements of schoolfellows.” This is entirely true, if “shrinking” means “abstaining.” He cared nothing for rough pastimes—though he would race about in the scanty playground with others, bear a hand in snowballing, and so on; but anything which would derive from personal liking, and would require time, pains, and practice—such as skating, fishing, or cricket—he left entirely aside. He did not want it; therefore he did not pursue it. To learn swimming, boating, and riding, would, no doubt, at school and after school, have been a benefit to him—a benefit which the habits and circumstances of the family and his own indifference withheld.

I was interested lately at finding, in a little on Edgar Allan Poe, a poet of my brother's marked predilection, an account of that singular genius as a schoolboy which might almost have been penned for Dante Rossetti. The volume was published at Baltimore in 1877, and cannot be widely known on this side of the Atlantic. The writer of the passage is Poe's schoolfellow at Richmond, Virginia, Colonel J. T. L. Preston. He says:— “Poe, as I recall my impressions now, was self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious, and, though of generous impulses, not steadily kind or even amiable.” For Rossetti, the last clause should rather run—“not definitely amiable, nor even always steadily kind.”

The punishments in King's College School were of a mild character. There was no flogging. Now and again an irritated master would cuff a boy, or give him a bang on the head with a book. This was an extempore, and I suppose an unsanctioned, performance. An offender was made to stand out in the middle of the room, or to stand upon a form for a while; or he was “kept in” during playtime; or he had to do an “imposition,” such as copying out the same line from Virgil fifty times over. An ingenious boy would brace together two or three pens at a proper gradient, and thus write two or three lines with one turn of the hand.

There was no schoolfellow with whom Dante Rossetti contracted an intimate acquaintance, far less a life-long friendship; but two or three were in our house at times, or we in theirs. One of these was young Lockhart, a grandson of Sir Walter Scott, aged about thirteen when Dante was nine; a handsome, slim, straight-built youth, with very correct features. He was a great hand at cutting out little models of boats. He became the Lieutenant Walter Scott Lockhart-Scott, owner of Abbotsford, and died in 1853, aged only twenty-seven. Another boy was a son of William Westall the Landscape-painter (brother of the Richard Westall so well-known to Dante Rossetti through , a painter of some note in his day, who gave instructions to the Princess Victoria). This boy had a brother of weak mind and sometimes rather dangerous (not in King's College School), who went by the undignified name of “Sillikin.” Another boy was Geldart Evans Riadore, who became a clergyman, and (I believe) Domestic Chaplain to the Duke of Buccleuch, a lad of good parts and refinement, son of a Doctor. Also the Wrays, sons of a deceased Colonial Judge; Boys, son of a leading printseller; Capper, whose father was a coal-merchant; Charles Anderson, who became a clergyman, doing good service in the East End of London; and the Willoughbys, sons of a legal gentleman living in Lancaster Place, close to King's College. Their family had the entrée to the Terrace of Somerset House overlooking the river; and we would sometimes join them on a half-holiday or holiday, taking possession of a little lodge there, burning shavings in an empty grate, and making an amount of noise which was not kindly taken by the Government Clerks whose windows opened on to the Terrace. These several boys are about all I could specify. I make no mention of a very few others who were little or not at all known to my brother in his schooldays, but only to myself while my schooling was prolonged beyond his.

Dante Rossetti had a certain faint repute among his class-fellows as being addicted to drawing or sketching—making, on an exercise-book or the margin of a school-book, something that was understood to figure a knight, cavalier, trooper, brigand, or what not—or as buying and colouring theatrical characters, illustrated serials, and the like. To this small extent, therefore, he was noted as a little uncommon; and of course his foreign name and comparatively unschoolboy-like habits counted for something. I suppose also—though I do not recollect precise instances in point—that he was known for reciting verses. A certain schoolfellow, probably after Dante had left, handed over to me three or four poetical compositions which he himself had produced, one of them beginning with the words, “I would I were a smiling bird.” Dante laughed over the term, and made a portrait of the bird in the act of smiling.

The Year 1842, when he quitted school, was the year of the Anglo-Chinese Opium War. He and I were told by a Master to make an original composition on the subject of China, and I think the composition had to be in verse. What he or I wrote I have totally forgotten: seemingly each of us must have produced some lines. Christina saw us at work, and chose to enter the poetic lists. She was then eleven years of age. She indited the following epical lines, which must (I apprehend) have been nearly the first verses she ever wrote.1 Will the reader pardon my printing them?

1 There was a neat couplet whichmay have been earlier:— “‘Come cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer!’ As the soldier remarked whose post lay in the rear.” Two stanzas, dated 27 April 1842, for our mother's birthday (our grandfather printed them on a card) were, I consider, earlier also. The original MS.—of a very childish aspect—is now in the British Museum.

These little and never frequent country excursions came to an end in 1839, when our grandfather resettled in London; and then Dante Rossetti, for two or three years, went out of London not at all, for our father had not the habit of making any annual seaside or rural trip. Dante's holidays, when school closed, were spent at home in London, varied by casual walks up to Hampstead, or the like. He painted theatrical characters, read books, and amused himself as the chance offered; and now he had at least the resource of going to his grandfather's house near Regent's Park whenever he felt so inclined. The house contained many books. It had, at the back, a moderate-sized garden, sloping down towards Regent's Canal; and in this garden a shed or summer-house sheltered the private printing-press which Polidori used. The fact—such I believe it to be—that Dante never once tried what he could do as a compositor is one more symptom of his great inaptitude at anything of a mechanical or directly practical kind. The workaday world was not his world.

In this house occurred a small incident which Mr. Caine has related—not with perfect accuracy. It did not take place when Dante was “rather less than nine years of age,” for he was already eleven when our grandfather entered the house. The incident may really belong to his twelfth, or possibly his thirteenth, year. He did not deliberately set-to at reciting the closing scene of ; but, taking up a chisel, he playfully motioned to strike Christina with it. As Maria had sense enough to object that it might hurt, he insisted that it would not; and (then for the first time speaking a few lines from , ending— “I took by the throat the circumcisèd dog, And smote him thus”) he struck the chisel forcibly against his chest. Naturally there was an incision, but not a serious one. Sangiovanni probed it, and pretty soon it was healed. The small matter is hardly worth adverting to, but may as well be set right.

Another small matter, a little more symptomatic as to the VOL. I. 6 boyhood of Rossetti, is the following. Maria was, as previously intimated, of an uncommonly enthusiastic temper, which eventually settled down into religious devotion. As she read very early and very constantly, her enthusiasms developed in divers directions: British tars, Napoleon, Englishmenversus Scotchmen (in relation to Walter Scott's writings), Grecian mythology, and the . alone was known to her. When Dante and I began learning Greek she resolved to learn some too, partly to help us in our lessons; and she made her way into the Greek New Testament, and could in her later years still read it fairly with the aid of a dictionary. While the fit was at its height, Dante, to please her, undertook to do a series of pen-and-ink designs for the epic, on a small scale, one design to each Book. This was in February 1840, when he was eleven years of age. These drawings—they still exist—are not in any tolerable degree good, nor even distinctly promising; but they may count for something as showing the lad's ambitious temper in design, and his willingness to take up any attempt that offered, however ludicrously inadequate his means for coping with it. I may add that Dante at this time, although he had not that glowing love of the which his sister entertained, liked it highly, and read it much. In later years he knew, and he also preferred, the .

From the I pass to other books read by Dante in his school-days, as a sequel to the details previously given relating to a still earlier period. The poet who superseded Walter Scott as prime favourite (always allowing for Shakespear, who was never superseded though he may have been less constantly read) was Byron. came first in the boy's esteem, and next and , with and others to follow. he read, but without special zest; in fact, throughout his life, the poetry of sentimental or reflective description had a very minor attraction for him. Of Dickens's , which came out in 1836, he seems to me to have known comparatively little; but , 1838-9, was very potent with him, followed by , , , etc. An illustrated serial named (but chivalry is not more prominent in its pages than some other things) was constantly read, and its woodcuts inspected and coloured; also another serial, of earlier date, called , full of ghosts, fiends, and magic, in prose and verse. There was likewise , abounding in dragons, enchanters, and other marvels of pseudo-chivalry. , with its amusing woodcuts, and the , were marked favourites. The mere thieves in the last-named repertory excited but a languid interest, but the murderers, and their “last dying speeches and confessions,” were conned with decided gusto. Of highly-reputed romances there were Bulwer's and , and, of minor romances, three serials— and , both by Pierce Egan the younger, and , by some obscure author whose name did not transpire. and were enjoyed, though not in any extreme degree. But perhaps in his earlier school-days—or from the age of nine to eleven— nothing delighted Dante quite so much as a small-sized series entitled , with coloured illustrations. A subsequent series appeared, which he relished somewhat less, whether because he was growing out of them, or on account of their being more forced and worked up in incident. The opening series comprised ; ; ; and a number of others: with such illustrations as; ; , etc., etc. This publication was followed by , a set of narratives from popular plays, contemporary or antecedent. These also were highly appreciated by Dante Rossetti. By the time he left school—turned of fourteen—he had devoured numerous novels, poems, and dramas, apart from those here specified, almost all of them being in English. In Italian there was little beyond Ariosto; in French, it may be that Hugo's preceded the close of his schooling, but I am not sure. At any rate this, and many other works of Hugo, both prose and verse, fascinated him hugely very soon afterwards; and French novels by a variety of authors were greatly in the ascendant for two or three years. It may be feared there was no solid reading —whether history, biography, or anything else—irrespectively of the few and fragmentary things that he had to get up as a part of the school course. His intellectual life was nurtured upon fancy and sympathy, not upon knowledge or information.

Dante Rossetti did not write much in boyhood, but he wrote something. I question whether and had any successor until in 1840 a grand scheme was started that every one of us four should write a romantic tale. I suppose each made a beginning, but I cannot affirm that any one of the quartette made an ending, unless it was Dante. His tale alone has been preserved, and it is so far completed as to bring a single set of incidents to a climax, without implying that anything else remains to be added. The tale is named . Its first chapter is headed, ; and it begins with the following sentence:— “ It was a dark and stormy night in the month of December when a figure, closely wrapped in the sable folds of his cloak, and mounted on a jaded steed, was seen hurrying across a bleak common towards a stately castle in the distance, whose lofty towers and time-worn battlements frowned over the wide expanse beneath. ” This may suffice; with the bare addition that the tale narrates how a lady was captured by a “marauder” who wanted to wed her perforce, and how she was rescued by her affianced knight. At some later date—it was 1843, or possibly just afterwards—Dante took up his old MS., and evidently regarded it as much behind the time. He altered its title to , cut it down freely, revised the phraseology of several remaining passages, and added a concluding sentence.

Rossetti's first printed “poem,” , seems to have been begun and nearly completed much about the same time as , or not later than May 1841. It is founded on a prose story by Allan Cunningham, which Rossetti had read in the , and I think elsewhere as well. His zest in writing this ballad-poem waned, and he laid it aside: but later on his grandfather Polidori told him that, if he would finish it, the luxury of print should be his at the private printing-press. So it was wound up, and printed in 1843, when Dante was either fourteen or fifteen years of age. The title-page is marked “for private circulation only”; and even private circulation was more than commensurate to the merit of . The story is substantially that of a knight who quits England for a foreign war, leaving his betrothed to the care of his cousin. While abroad, he discovers, by a vision in a magic mirror, that the cousin has betrayed his trust, and is offering violence to the lady. The knight hastens home, slays the aggressor, and recovers his bride. The ballad is versified with ease and correctness, in three or four different metres, and is not wholly destitute of spirit in its boyish way; but the way is boyish in the fullest sense, and the poem cannot be said to show any express faculty or superior promise. Rossetti, when he grew up, hated to hear this puerile attempt alluded to. I used to have a large remainder-stock of ; but at his particular request, somewhere towards 1875, I rather reluctantly destroyed the whole impression, with the exception of a very few copies, and the ballad exists only for a dozen or so of curious collectors here and there, and for readers in the British Museum Library. My brother left behind him a little memorandum (the handwriting indicates a date towards 1881), which runs as follows:— “ I make this note after a conversation with a friend who had been reading in the British Museum a ridiculous first attempt of mine in verse, called , which was printed when I was fourteen, but written (except the last page or two) at twelve—as my family would probably remember. When I was fourteen my grandfather (who amused himself by having a small private printing-press) offered, if I would finish it, to print it. I accordingly added the last precious touches two years after writing the rest. I leave this important explanation, as there is no knowing what fool may some day foist the absurd trash into print as a production of mine. It is curious and surprising to myself, as evincing absolutely no promise at all—less than should exist even at twelve. When I wrote it, the only English poet I had read was Sir. W. Scott, as is plain enough in it. ”

This last statement is not wholly correct. There had been Shakespear, and I am sure, before my brother was twelve, a good deal of Byron as well.

I have by me a MS. of an effusion, , shorter than , written when my brother was fifteen, in a style which is compounded of Walter Scott and the old Scottish ballads; it may also present some trace of Bürger's . This may be accounted a trifle inferior even to the performance denounced by its author in such vigorous terms. It narrates how a wicked Knight slew a virtuous one, hurled into a moat the virtuous one's lady-love, and got killed by an avenging flash of lightning. This my brother offered for publication to the Editor of some magazine —I fancy —along with an outline design to illustrate it. The outline, not so greatly amiss, is adapted from a group in one of Filippo Pistrucci's lithographs from Roman history, the Rape of the Sabines. The Editor was too sensible to publish either poem or design. It will be perceived that this small transaction belongs to a date a little later than that when Rossetti left school; but it is mentioned The third drawing of Bulwer's Rienzi mentioned at the bottom of the page is unknown. here so as to close my references to these very early efforts in verse. There may possibly have been a few others, but I fail to recollect any. The reader may have noticed that the times of chivalry always furnished his boyish inspiration; in fact, he thought of little else about this date. Neither the antique nor the modern exercised the least sway over his fancy.

A few words more may be bestowed upon childish drawings; I mention such only as I find inscribed with a distinct date. Two are coloured designs, October 1836 (age eight), from Monk Lewis's thrilling drama of . One is , the other , each personage being in full face, which may suggest that little Dante hardly knew how to set about a profile. In 1838 he produced a scene of school-life from his “Lower First” class. It is lettered . These two Divisions of the schoolboys are represented as indulging in a free fight. The design is not quite so bad as might be expected, the actions having a certain degree of natural spirit and diversity. Then comes, 1840, an illustrated title-page, forming a neat and rather prettyish decorative combination, for the four juvenile stories of which was one. Anyhow he got a great deal into the small space of a page of note-paper. There are four circular half-figures of armoured knights, and four oblong compositions exhibiting incidents in the tales. The four knights are inscribed thus: ; ; ; . And the four compositions thus: ; ; ; . Next are three small designs, 1840, from the — , and two others. Three largeish separate figures[drawing 1] [drawing 2] from Bulwer's , May to July 1840, come next; done with pen and ink in a painstaking manner, though not with anything, in character or costume, above the types which Dante derived from his beloved theatrical characters. November 1840 witnessed the production of (dictating, it would seem, the signing of Magna Charta). This is a companion-drawing to the trio, but perceptibly better. Last we find a modern subject of a patriotic turn, taken, I assume, from a little volume of naval anecdotes which Maria used to cherish. Its theme is inscribed as follows:— “‘As you are not of my parish,’ said a gentleman to a begging sailor, ‘I cannot think of relieving you.’ ‘Sir,’ replied the tar with an air of heroism, ‘I lost my leg fighting for all parishes.’” This is dated August 1841, and certainly shows some increased degree of facility in putting a couple of figures together so as to form a group and tell a story.

It must have been, I think, just before Dante Rossetti left school that he began learning German. He learned it well up to a certain point, yet not so as to read freely; and I suppose that, by the age of twenty-five to thirty, he may have forgotten four-fifths of what he had acquired. One day Dr. Adolf Heimann, the Professor of German at University College, presented himself in our house, saying that he wished to learn Italian from our father, and would be prepared in recompense to teach German to the four children. He was a German-Jew, an excellent little man of considerable acquirements, and as kind-hearted, open, genial a person as any one could wish to know. The arrangement was assented to; and Dante, with the rest of us, set to at German, learning the grammar and pronunciation, reading the (folk-stories), some easy things in Schiller, etc. For several years after this date—or up to 1848 or thereabouts—we saw more of the Heimann family than of any other. The Doctor married towards 1843, and soon there were children in the house.