lly independent of auxiliary aids, must now
as then go farthest to determine Rossetti's final place among poets.

Such as is here described was the first reception given to Rossetti's
volume of poetry; but at the close of 1871, there arose out of it a
long and acrimonious controversy. It seems necessary to allude to this
painful matter, because it involved serious issues; but an effort alike
after brevity and impartiality of comment shall be observed in what is
said of it. In October of the year mentioned, an article entitled _The
Fleshly School of Poetry_, and signed "Thomas Maitland," appeared
in _The Contemporary Review_. {*} It consisted in the main of an
impeachment of Rossetti's poetry on the ground of sensuality, though it
embraced a broad denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age in
art, music, poetry, the drama, and social life generally. Sensuality was
regarded as the phenomenon of the age. "It lies," said the writer, "on
the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is
part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it
breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of
the girl in Hawthorne's tale. It covers the shelves of the great
Oxford-Street librarian, lurking in the covers of three-volume novels.
It is on the French booksellers' counters, authenticated by the
signature of the author of the _Visite de Noces_. It is here, there,
and everywhere, in art, literature, life, just as surely as it is in
the _Fleurs de Mal_, the Marquis de Sade's _Justine_, or the _Monk_ of
Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to all dispositions, to all ages. If
the querulous man of letters has his Baudelaire, the pimpled clerk has
his _Day's Doings_, and the dissipated artisan his _Day and Night._"
When the writer set himself to inquire into the source of this social
cancer, he refused to believe that English society was honeycombed and
rotten. He accounted for the portentous symptoms that appalled him by
attributing the evil to a fringe of real English society, chiefly, if
not altogether, resident in London: "a sort of demi-monde, not composed,
like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of
indolent habits and aesthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel
writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and
gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to
mouth." It was to this Bohemian fringe of society that t