When one of the Universities undertakes to provide our colleges and schools with comments and notes on a poem so saturated with classicism as _Adonais_, the least that could be expected from bodies who are, as it were, the guardians of classical literature, is the provision that the classical part of the work should be done at least competently; it would be hardly too much, perhaps, to expect that it should be done excellently. Of this part of Mr. Rossetti’s work we scarcely know which are the worse--his sins of commission or his sins of omission. His classical qualifications for commenting on a poem as unintelligible, critically speaking, without constant reference to the Platonic dialogues, particularly to the _Symposium_ and the _Timæus_, and to the Greek poets, as the _Æneid_ would be without reference to the Homeric poems and the _Argonautica_ of Apollonius, appear to begin and end with some acquaintance with Mr. Lang’s version of Bion and Moschus. We will give a few specimens. Mr. Rossetti is greatly puzzled with Shelley’s allusion to Urania in stanzas 2 to 4. “Where was lone Urania When Adonais died?” “Most musical of mourners, weep again. Lament, anew, Urania!” “Why out of the nine sisters,” he asks, “should the Muse of Astronomy be selected? Keats never wrote about astronomy.” Perhaps, he suggests, Shelley was not thinking of the Muse Urania, “but of Aphrodite Urania.” Yet, if so, why should she be called “musical”?--a question to be asked, no doubt, as our old friend Falstaff would say. However, after balancing the respective claims of both, he finally comes to the conclusion that the Urania of _Adonais_ is Aphrodite. If Mr. Rossetti had been acquainted with a work to which he never even refers, but which exercised immense influence over Shelley’s poem--the _Symposium_ of Plato--it would have saved him two pages of speculation. His ignorance of this is the more surprising as Shelley has himself translated the dialogue. But Mr. Rossetti need not, in this case, have gone so far afield. Has he never read the prologue to the seventh book of Milton’s _Paradise Lost_? In his note on the lines-- “The one remains, the many change and pass,” it is really pitiable to find him supposing that this is an allusion to “the universal mind,” and “the individuated minds which we call human beings,” when any schoolboy could have told him that the allusion is, of course, a technical one to the Platonic “forms” or archetypes; while “the power” in stanza 42, the “sustaining love” in stanza 54, and the “one spirit” in stanza 43, are allusions respectively to the Aphrodite Urania in the discourse of Eryximachus in the _Symposium_, and to the Divine Artificer in the _Timæus_. And these dialogues form the proper commentary on Shelley’s metaphysics in this poem. Still more extraordinary is Mr. Rossetti’s note on “wisdom the mirrored shield”-- “What was then Wisdom, the mirrored shield?”