So demoralized has the literary world become by the present craze for notoriety and for personal details of prominent men that an executor who in regard to the disposal of his testator’s money would act with the most rigid scrupulousness will, in regard to the MSS. he finds in his testator’s desk, commit, “for the benefit of the public,” an outrage that would have made the men of a less vulgar period shudder. The “benefit of the public,” indeed! Who is this “public,” and what are its rights as against the rights of the dead poet, whose heartstrings are woven into “copy” by the disloyal friend he trusted? The inherent callousness of man’s nature is never so painfully seen as in the relation of this ogre, “the public,” to dead genius. Without the smallest real reverence for genius—without the smallest capacity of distinguishing the poetaster it always adores from the true poet it always ignores—the public can still fall down before the pedestal upon which genius has been placed by the select few—fall down with its long ears wide open for gossip about genius, or anything else that is talked about. It was with such thoughts as these that we opened the present somewhat bulky volume {195}—not, however, with many misgivings; for Christina Rossetti, before she made her brother executor, knew what were his views as to the rights of the public as against the rights of genius. And if he has printed here every poem he could lay hands upon, he may fairly be assumed to have done so with the consent of a sister whom he loved so dearly and by whom he was so dearly loved. Fortunately there are not many of these relics that are devoid of a deep interest, some from the biographical point of view, some from the poetical.