It is easily argued that all criticism, all appreciation even, resolves itself ultimately into a question of temperament. To some minds, and these not the least discriminate, the very limitations and extravagances of Pre-Raphaelitism appeal with a peculiar force. There are whole aspects of life which Romance, if it touch, can never transfigure. The passionate, brooding loveliness of Rossetti’s women, the remote and subtle pathos of Holman Hunt, the dreamy and yet vivid tenderness of Millais’s earlier style,—these are not qualities of universal charm: they are the outcome of special moods and conditions which find neither voice nor answer save in the channels they themselves create. It is only given to a rarely catholic genius—a Shakespeare, a Handel, or a Raphael— to move, as it were, the broad currents of common feeling, and to command the general sympathies of the educated world. Artists of more distinctive and personal quality—a Shelley in poetry, a Chopin in music, or a Rossetti in painting—will rather gain each an elect circle of interpreters through whom to sway less immediately the thought of their generation; the more so since in the realm of the fine arts is felt most potently the growing tendency to specialize both thought and utterance in the tension of modern life. “Our age,” it has been aptly said, “has seen a specialization of emotions as well as of studies and industries. Let us not then expect all things from any man. Let us welcome the best representative of every mood of the mind.”[1] The private life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, though leaving to those who loved him an inexhaustible harvest of tender and pathetic memories, was outwardly uneventful enough, save for the one romance and tragedy of his early manhood by which he is vaguely known to the outer world. But behind the veil of recordable history, few artists have suffered greater mental vicissitudes in a lifetime of half a century, or have lived at such high spiritual pressure and imaginative strain. London-born and London-bred though he was, the force of his Italian parentage and temperament isolated him—save for a very few congenial spirits—in an alien world; and though his work in painting and poetry was largely Saxonized by training and environment, the man himself was oppressed with the burden of an imagination steeped in the very soul of mediæval Florentine romance. His whole nature was overstrung and at the mercy of physical and social “weather.” Memory, daily experience, his own conceptions and creations in design and poetry, small incidents of life woven by his own feverish brain into actual calamity, possessed him with a power simply incomprehensible to the average mind. Like Sir Bedevere, striding from ridge to ridge in Lyonness,— “His own thought drove him like a goad.”