r, add to death itself a new
terror, and make one wish that all art were anonymous. Nor could there
have been any more unfortunate choice of a subject for popular treatment
than that to which we owe the memoir that now lies before us. A pillar
of fire to the few who knew him, and of cloud to the many who knew him
not, Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived apart from the gossip and tittle-tattle
of a shallow age. He never trafficked with the merchants for his soul,
nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to gape at.
Passionate and romantic though he was, yet there was in his nature
something of high austerity. He loved seclusion, and hated notoriety,
and would have shuddered at the idea that within a few years after his
death he was to make his appearance in a series of popular biographies,
sandwiched between the author of Pickwick and the Great Lexicographer.
One man alone, the friend his verse won for him, did he desire should
write his life, and it is to Mr. Theodore Watts that we, too, must look
to give us the real Rossetti. It may be admitted at once that Mr.
Watts's subject has for the moment been a little spoiled for him. Rude
hands have touched it, and unmusical voices have made it sound almost
common in our ears. Yet none the less is it for him to tell us of the
marvel of this man whose art he has analysed with such exquisite insight,
whose life he knows as no one else can know it, whom he so loyally loved
and tended, and by whom he was so loyally beloved in turn. As for the
others, the scribblers and nibblers of literature, if they indeed
reverence Rossetti's memory, let them pay him the one homage he would
most have valued, the gracious homage of silence. 'Though you can fret
me, yet you cannot play upon me,' says Hamlet to his false friend, and
even so might Rossetti speak to those well-intentioned mediocrities who
would seem to know his stops and would sound him to the top of his
compass. True, they cannot fret him now, for he has passed beyond the
possibility of pain; yet they cannot play upon him either; it is not for
them to pluck out the heart of his mystery.

There is, however, one feature of this book that deserves unstinted
praise. Mr. Anderson's bibliography will be found of immense use by
every student of Rossetti's work and influence. Perhaps Young's very
powerful attack on Pre-Raphaelitism, as expounded by Mr. Ruskin
(Longmans, 1857), might be included, but, in all other respect