such acceptance; nor can Sir Percival (1886) be pronounced an artistic triumph, spite of its restrained power and the delicate, over-refined style which marked it and all the author's works. The Countess Eve (1888) showed more of the author's characteristically tender spiritual suggestion. A Teacher of the Violin (1888), Blanche, Lady Falaise (1891), prefaces or introductions to Herbert's Temple (1882), an essay on The Platonism of Wordsworth (1882), a translation from Molinos (1883), and one or two other republications practically exhaust the list of his published works. The Earl of Lytton (EDWARD ROBERT BULWER LYTTON, 1831-91), son of the first Lord Lytton (page 332), was educated at Harrow and at Bonn, and in 1849 went to Washington as attaché THE EARL OF LYTTON, G.C. B. From the Portrait by G. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait and private secretary to his uncle, Sir Henry Bulwer; subsequently he was attaché, secretary of legation, consul or chargé d'affaires at Florence, Paris, the Hague, St Petersburg and Constantinople, Vienna, Belgrade, Athens, Lisbon, Madrid, and Paris. In 1873 he succeeded his father as second Lord Lytton, and in 1876 became Viceroy of India. Made Earl of Lytton on his resignation in 1880, he was in 1887 sent as ambassador to Paris, and there he died. With more of the poetic equipment than his father possessed-imaginative vigour, facility of expression, metrical skill and gracehe yet never seemed to put his best strength into his poems, which were to the last the work of a brilliant amateur. His works, published mostly under the pseudonym of 'Owen Meredith,' include Clytemnestra (1855), a dramatic poem; The Wanderer; Lucile (1860), a novel in verse, probably his most successful work; a volume of what were called 'translations from the Servian;' The Ring of Amasis, a prose romance; Orval, or the Fool of Time; Fables in Song; Glenaveril (1885), an epic of modern life, in which, perhaps, he most nearly succeeded in imprinting character and individuality on his work; After Paradise (1887); Marah (1892); and King Poppy (1892). A selection from his poems by Miss M. Betham-Edwards appeared in 1890. He left his biography of his father incomplete-but only too complete on the unhappy relations between his father and mother. Charles Stuart Calverley (1831-84), prince of parodists, was the son of the Rev. Henry Blayds, who in 1852 took the name of Calverley. Born at Martley in Worcestershire, from Harrow he passed to Balliol College, Oxford, whence in 1852 (the over-exuberance of his boyish spirits having come into conflict with academic discipline-he would jump over the college walls) he migrated to Christ's College, Cambridge. He won the Craven and other distinctions, graduated as second classic in 1856, and in 1858 was elected a Fellow of his college. At the university he was famous less for his scholarship, brilliant though it was (for he was not so industrious as he might have been), than for his gifts as a writer of clever verse, as a musician, as a caricaturist, as a talker, and as an athlete. The famous Pickwick paper (in answering which Professor Skeat was first and Sir Walter Besant second) was one of his happiest jeux d'esprit in prose, and was set in 1857, when he was a don. In 1865 he was called to the Bar, and settled in London, but a neglected fall on the ice at Oulton Hall, Leeds (his father-in-law's place), in the winter of 1866-67 put an end to what might have been an exceptionally brilliant career; for the remaining seventeen years of his life he was a confirmed invalid, the original concussion of the brain being followed by other maladies. One of the most gifted men of his time, and unrivalled as a humourist, Calverley will be remembered by his two little volumes, Verses and Translations (1862) and Fly-Leaves (1872). His serious verse is much of it very admirable; but it is for his humorous verses in various kinds that C. S. C. is best known to the world. His parodies, particularly that of Jean Ingelow, were obviously the best that had appeared since the Rejected Addresses, and in their own line are unequalled in modern English literature, innumerable as his imitators have been. Calverley's parodies have the highest qualities parodies can have: they depend not on a burlesque reproduction of the words or rhythms parodied, on the exaggeration of mannerisms, the caricaturing of mere externals, but get wonderfully near the whole spirit of the originals. His work exhibits a singular combination of delicate insight, creative imagination, genial but trenchant satire, lightness of touch, and mastery of rhythms. Some of his parodies are poems themselves. His ripe scholarship found admirable expression in his numerous renderings from and into Latin and Greek; and his Theocritus (1869) displays also his facile mastery of English verse. His Literary Remains were published in 1885, with a Memoir by his brother-in-law, Sir W. J. Sendall, and reminiscences of Calverley by friends such as Dr Buller, Sir John Seeley, and Sir Walter Besant. An edition of the Complete Works appeared in 1901. The first of the examples quoted below, in which Rossetti's ballad manner is playfully 'taken off,' appeared in Chambers's Journal in 1869; the other is one of those in which some of Miss Ingelow's weaknesses were made fun of. Ballad. The auld wife sat at her ivied door, (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) A thing she had frequently done before ; And her spectacles lay on her apron'd knees. The piper he piped on the hill-top high, (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) Till the cow said 'I die,' and the goose ask'd 'Why?' And the dog said nothing, but search'd for fleas. The farmer he strode through the square farmyard; (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) His last brew of ale was a trifle hard The connexion of which with the plot one sees. The farmer's daughter hath frank blue eyes; The farmer's daughter hath ripe red lips; Which wholly consisted of lines like these. She sat with her hands 'neath her dimpled cheeks, She sat, with her hands 'neath her crimson cheeks; (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) She gave up mending her father's breeks, And let the cat roll in her new chemise. She sat, with her hands 'neath her burning cheeks, Lovers, and a Reflection. In moss-prankt dells which the sunbeams flatter (And heaven it knoweth what that may mean; Meaning, however, is no great matter) Where woods are a-tremble, with rifts atween ; Thro' God's own heather we wonn'd together, I need hardly remark it was glorious weather, By rises that flush'd with their purple favours, Thro' becks that brattled o'er grasses sheen, We walked and waded, we two young shavers, Thanking our stars we were both so green. We journeyed in parallels, I and Willie, In fortunate parallels! Butterflies, Hid in weltering shadows of daffodilly Or marjoram, kept making peacock eyes: Song-birds darted about, some inky As coal, some snowy (I ween) as curds; Or rosy as pinks, or as roses pinky- They reck of no eerie To-come, those birds! But they skim over bents which the mill-stream washes, Or hang in the lift 'neath a white cloud's hem; They need no parasols, no goloshes; And good Mrs Trimmer she feedeth them. Then we thrid God's cowslips (as erst His heather) That endowed the wan grass with their golden blooms; And snapt (it was perfectly charming weather)— Our fingers at Fate and her goddess-glooms: And Willie 'gan sing (O, his notes were fluty; Wafts fluttered them out to the white-wing'd sea)Something made up of rhymes that have done much duty, Rhymes (better to put it) of 'ancientry :' O if billows and pillows and hours and flowers, How much fewer volumes of verse there'd be ! John Addington Symonds (1840-93), the son of a Bristol physician, was educated at Harrow and Balliol, won the Newdigate, and was elected a Fellow of Magdalen in 1862. Warned by chest weakness to give up the study of law, he after his marriage (1865) cheerfully chose literature as a profession, and by 1874 had collected in book form a series of sketches in Italy and Greece first published in the magazines. His Introduction to the Study of Dante (1872) was followed by Studies of the Greek Poets (1873-76), and his opus magnum on the Renaissance in Italy (6 vols. 1875-86), suggestive and brilliant in many parts, but not a complete, systematic, or entirely satisfactory presentation of so vast a subject. Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama (1884) was a real contribution to the history of dramatic literature in England. Symonds wrote books on Shelley, Sidney, and Ben Jonson, on Walt Whitman and Boccaccio; masterly translations of the Sonnets of Michelangelo and Campanella (1878), of Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, and of students' Latin songs of the twelfth century (1884); a Life of Michelangelo (1892); some volumes of verse and of essays and criticisms; and an account of his residence (for health's sake) at Davos Platz (1892). A Life was compiled from his letters by H. F. Brown (1895). Richard Jefferies (1848-87)-in full, JOHN RICHARD JEFFERIES-was born at the farmhouse of Coate, two and a half miles from Swindon in Wiltshire. He started life as a journalist on the staff of the North Wilts Herald about 1866, and for twelve years was busy with this kind of work and with writing crude novels. His name first became known by a long letter to the Times, in November 1872, on the labourers of Wiltshire, which procured him an opening to the magazines as a writer on agricultural and rural topics. In 1877 he abandoned country journalism, and moved nearer to London, hoping to make a living by his pen. In the following year he won his first real success with The Gamekeeper at Home, printed in the Pall Mall Gazette; its sub-title, 'Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life,' indicates the kind of work by which his future fame was won. Other books written in the same vein, or on similar subjects, are Wild Life in a Southern County (1879), The Amateur Poacher (1880), Wood Magic (1881), Round about a Great Estate (1881), Nature near London (1883), Life of the Fields (1884), Red Deer (on Exmoor; 1884), and The Open Air (1885). Bevis (1882) glorifies his own memories of childhood; The Story of My Heart (1883) is a strange, idealised autobiography of inner life. Besides these he wrote some later novels less characteristic of his natural vein; After London, or Wild England (1885), is a curious romance of the future -England sunk into a primitive wilderness, and not even the ruins of Westminster Abbey visible for New Zealanders or others. He died at Goring in Sussex, after a long and painful illness of six years. Within his own province, although it was not a wide one, Jefferies was admirable. He possessed a wonderful insight into the habits and ways of animals and birds and creeping things, and a great love of them. No English writer has shown a more minute and accurate acquaintance with the life of the hedgerows and woodlands and fields of southern England; the joy of life in him rises to a passion. He had a reverent feeling for nature, not only of her outward phases and aspects, but also of what may be termed her inner life, though hardly possessing Wordsworth's depth of vision. Nor were human beings excluded from the range of his observation and sympathy: he has left admirable sketches of country-folk-farmers, gamekeepers, labourers, and village-loafers; he had not a little in common with Borrow, and something with Thoreau. But as a writer he stands alone, though he has had many imitators, in the cult of nature. For many critics his method of cataloguing natural phenomena and experiences is too photographic, or like an infinity of shorthand notes written out at length. For others it is wholly delightful; Sir Walter Besant said he knew 'nothing in the English language finer, whether for the sustained style or the elevation that fills it,' than The Pageant of Summer, from which this is a characteristic paragraph: Green rushes, long and thick, standing up above the edge of the ditch, told the hour of the year as distinctly as the shadows on the dial the hour of the day. Green and thick and sappy to the touch, they felt like summer, soft and elastic, as if full of life, mere rushes though they were. On the fingers they left a green scent; rushes have a separate scent of green, so, too, have ferns, very different to that of grass and leaves. Rising from brown sheaths, the tall stems enlarged a little in the middle, like classical columns, and heavy with sap and freshness, leaned against the hawthorn sprays. From the earth they had drawn its moisture. See Sir Walter Besant's Eulogy (1888) and the Life by H. S. Salt (1893). Dante Gabriel Rossetti* (1828-82), christened Charles Gabriel Dante, was the eldest son and second child of Gabriele Rossetti, Italian scholar and patriot, who spent the last thirty years of his life in exile in London, and of Frances Polidori, the sister of Lord Byron's friend. In blood Rossetti was three-fourths Italian, the English strain coming through his mother's mother, whose maiden name was Pierce. He was born in London, and educated at King's College School, early took to painting, and in 1846 entered the antique school of the Royal Academy, where he made the acquaintance of William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. By his personal magnetism and his enthusiasm for the conversion of others to his own ideas, Rossetti was a natural leader of men; and he has the best title to be regarded as the founder of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, a movement to do away in painting with the grandiose conceptions and fluent technique of the Academies of Art, and to recapture something of the religious intensity and humble, painstaking her, in her coffin. Some seven years later he yielded to the persuasions of his friends and permitted them to be disinterred. The volume entitled Poems was published in 1870, and became the centre of fierce controversy. In 'The Fleshly School of Poetry,' an article contributed to the Contemporary Review (October 1871) over the signature 'Thomas Maitland,' and reprinted separately, Mr Robert Buchanan stated the case of Rossetti's assailants, which, faintly outlined a year DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. From the Drawing by himself (1846) in the National Portrait Gallery. attention to detail of the early Italian painters. The immediate occasion, says Mr Holman Hunt, of the founding of the Brotherhood was the discovery, at Millais' house, of a book of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa. The short-lived magazine, The Germ, was planned in 1849 to promulgate the ideas of the Brotherhood, and in 1851 Mr Ruskin wrote to the Times to defend them from the contumely that they had already excited. Rossetti's first oil-painting, 'The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,' belongs to the year 1849; before this date he had produced some of his finest poetic work, notably The Blessed Damozel and The Portrait. For the next ten years he worked hard at poetry and painting, and in 1861 published his first volume of translations, The Early Italian Poets. The publication of his original poems was delayed by the death of his wife, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who died in 1862, less than two years after their marriage. In the despair of his grief Rossetti buried the manuscript poems, many of which had been written for 145 before in Black wood's Magazine, was restated later in the Quarterly (1872), and, after his death, with even greater ferocity and rancour in the British Quarterly (1882). Apart from personal innuendo, these attacks charged Rossetti's poetry with gross animalism and vapid affectation. It is not easy to understand why Mr Buchanan's assault should have affected Rossetti as it did, but from this time he became habitually depressed and moody, more secluded in his habits, and addicted to the frequent use of chloral. He had lived and worked in a circle of sympathy, and this covert at tack, delivered by a professed poet, revealed to him, perhaps for the first time, the breadth and depth of the popular misunderstanding of poetry. He replied, in a moderate and serious vein, under the title 'The Stealthy School of Criticism' (Athenæum, 1871), showing that in his sonnets, if they be not garbled by malice, 'all the passionate and just delights of the body are declared-somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakably to be as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times. Years later, in a private letter, Mr Buchanan admitted that he had been 'most unjust' when he 'impugned the purity and misconceived the passion of writings, too hurriedly read, and reviewed currente calamo!' From his wife's death onward Rossetti lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where for a short time he shared his house with Mr Swinburne, Mr George Meredith, and his brother, Mr W. M. Rossetti. In 1874 he published Dante and his Circle, a volume of translations wonderful for their fidelity to the matter and form of the originals, and in * Copyright 1903 by J. B. Lippincott Company to "Sonnet VII.-Supreme Surrender," page 644. 1881 Ballads and Sonnets, which contains the completed sonnet-sequence entitled The House of Life. In the following year he died, from the effects of a paralytic stroke, at Birchington near Margate. All who knew Rossetti personally are at one in testifying to the dominant influence and power of his temperament and intellect over those with whom he was brought into contact. He was vehement, passionate, wilful, brusque in phrase and manner, absolutely direct and sincere, genial and often playful in humour. The very force and largeness of his temper made him a leader, and turned his ideas into movements. During his later years the so-called 'Esthetic Movement,' which directed itself, not without a mixture of affectation, to the cult of beauty in daily life, bore witness to his influence. In literature his main ideas were held, with inevitable characteristic differences, by William Morris and Walter Pater. In disciples of weaker mind and feebler temper the worship of beauty and passion became little better than a fashionable craze-the amusement of brainless and bloodless eccentrics. Yet even the æsthetic movement helped to break up the prevalent indifference of the British public to the fine arts by giving to art the more intelligible form of a religion. In all the poetic and artistic movement of the mid-nineteenth century Rossetti was a prime force in England, as Baudelaire was in France. Alone among his Pre-Raphaelite associates he was first of all a poet. It is not wholly easy to apply the Pre-Raphaelite doctrine to poetry, yet in Rossetti's early poems its influence may be traced. The Pre-Raphaelites aimed at a minute fidelity in the representation of natural objects, and modelled their practice on the Tuscan artists of the earlier Renaissance. To the modern impressionist, with his fuller psychology of vision, fidelity to nature may well seem inconsistent with discipleship to the early Tuscans. Yet all depends upon the attitude and purpose of the painter. The Pre-Raphaelites looked at nature not as a vague pageant of tones fading into one another, and leading up to a focus of interest, but as an ordered array of objects, each infinitely worthy of intense and reverential scrutiny. Their multitudes are not the crowds of earth, but the hierarchies of an imagined heaven, where each soul is a point of light. They arrange images and impressions as the Japanese arrange flowers, so that each may keep its perfect independence and none be lost in the mass. A religious sense inspires their efforts, but it is still a religion of the eye nothing is too small for attention; the meaning of nature is in every part; all natural forms, if they be carefully observed, are perfect in beauty. The Pre-Raphaelites love order, procession, ritual; and to gratify this taste they thin out the wild profusion of nature as a forester thins a wood. Their eye is the eye of a child, who sees the shape of the clover-leaf long before he sees the clouds or the gradations of shadow on the hills. This love of distinctness and clarity, of the perfection and chastity of sharply separated existences, may be found in Rossetti's earliest poems. These poems owe much to the Tuscan painters, and seem to belong to an earlier and more religious order of ideas. The Blessed Damozel, holding the three lilies in her hand and wearing the seven stars in her hair, gazing from the rampart of God's house far down into the gulf where the moon flutters like a little feather, is described with a homely simplicity and tenderness of language which recalls the best phase of mediæval literature, modified by the influence of Italian painting: Herself shall bring us, hand in hand, And angels meeting us shall sing To their citherns and citoles. The same influences are visible in The Staff and Scrip: The lists are set in Heaven to-day, The bright pavilions shine; Fair hangs thy shield, and none gainsay; The trumpets sound in sign That she is thine. And in The Portrait a similar method is used with that ease and mastery in figurative suggestion which is one of Rossetti's great powers: While hopes and aims long lost with her The The distinct perception and close delineation of single things seen can never of itself make fine poetry. Its poetic value depends on its relation to feeling, its service rendered by way of suggesting or expressing the governing emotion. fixed, intense gaze of passion sees things almost supernaturally distinct; when the mind is under the stress of some great pain, or lifted on the wave of some great joy, the senses are abnormally acute. From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory: One thing then learnt remains to me,— So the Pre-Raphaelite method touches a perfection in poetry that it missed in painting; for in poetry it is employed in strict subordination to a single feeling. Tennyson's 'blue fly buzzing in the pane,' which was ridiculed by some of his early critics, awakens at once a sense of the dreary monotony of life in the deserted house. Rossetti's My Sister's Sleep is an even finer example of the same poetic mode. Watch is being kept at midnight in the sick-room; and twelve strikes : Our mother rose from where she sat : |