t it, and I will do something with it before I have
done."

CHAPTER VII.

The Pre-Raphaelites.

In the latter half of the century the Italian Middle Age and Dante, its
great exemplar, found new interpreters in the Rossetti family; a family
well fitted by its mixture of bloods and its hereditary aptitudes,
literary and artistic, to mediate between the English genius and whatever
seemed to it alien or repellant in Dante's system of thought. The
father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a political refugee, who held the
professorship of Italian in King's College, London, from 1831 to 1845,
and was the author of a commentary on Dante which carried the
politico-allegorical theory of the "Divine Comedy" to somewhat fantastic
lengths. The mother was half English and half Italian, a sister of
Byron's travelling companion, Dr. Polidori. Of the four children of the
marriage, Dante Gabriel and Christina became poets of distinction. The
eldest sister, Maria Francesca, a religious devotee who spent her last
years as a member of a Protestant sisterhood, was the author of that
unpretentious but helpful piece of Dante literature, "A Shadow of Dante."
The younger brother, William Michael, is well known as a biographer,
_litterateur_, and art critic, as an editor of Shelley and of the works
of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Other arts besides the literary art had partaken in the romantic
movement. The eighteenth century had seen the introduction of the new,
or English, school of landscape gardening; and the premature beginnings
of the Gothic revival in architecture, which reached a successful issue
some century later.[1] Painting in France had been romanticised in the
thirties _pari passu_ with poetry and drama; and in Germany, Overbeck and
Cornelius had founded a school of sacred art which corresponds, in its
mediaeval spirit, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In England painting
was the last of the arts to catch the new inspiration. When the change
came, it evinced that same blending of naturalism and Gothicism which
defined the incipient romantic movement of the previous century.
Painting, like landscape gardening, returned to nature; like
architecture, it went back to the past. Like these, and like literature
itself, it broke away from a tradition which was academic, if not
precisely classic in the way in which David was classic.

In 1848 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established by three young
painters, Dante Gabriel Rosse