honoured at the last as a patriot in his native land. Their elder daughter, Maria, departed this life in 1876, and in December, 1894, Christina Rossetti also died, leaving as sole survivor of this brilliant family the younger son, William Michael, well known as a literary critic and as the biographer of his more famous brother. Albeit English in its main external features, the environment of the Rossetti family in London remained essentially Italian during their father's lifetime. Gabriele Rossetti was a commentator on Dante, and himself a writer of verse, mainly in a politico-patriotic vein. To the ears of the young Gabriel, familiarized by habit with the sonorous metres of the "Inferno" and "Paradiso," the name of Dante for many years conjured up no very stimulating thoughts. It was not until he had begun as a young man to read upon his own lines, that the pictorial richness and splendour of the Florentine dawned on him and seized him with its spell. "The 'Convito,'" he says, "was a name of dread to us, as being the very essence of arid unreadableness,"--an interesting fact to remember when dealing, as we shall presently have to do, with the influence which Dante was destined afterwards to exert upon two members at least of the family. Reared in this studious atmosphere, however, it is not to be wondered at that the young Rossettis early took to literature. Before they were six years old they had made acquaintance with Shakespeare and Scott, in addition to the usual works of childhood, and were steeped in romance of a more lofty kind than is common at such an age. Of Rossetti's early literary efforts it is sufficient to mention two: "The Slave," a bombastic drama in blank verse, which occupied his faculties at the age of five, and "Sir Hugh the Heron," a legendary poem founded on a tale by Allan Cunningham. These two productions do not sum up the juvenile work of Rossetti of which a record has been kept, but they are quite as much as it is fair to mention, and serve sufficiently to show the romantic drift of his earliest ideas. In art he was scarcely less precocious; a pretty story being told of a milkman, who came upon him in the passage sketching his rocking-horse, and expressed considerable surprise at having seen "a baby making a picture." Drawings of this date exist, and also later ones done when he was in the habit of preparing illustrations for books he read and for his own romances. In point of quality, however, these juvenile sketches are not to be compared with those of many masters of the brush who began early, for example with those of Millais, and are chiefly interesting in connection with a statement of his brother that "he could not remember any date at which it was not an understood thing in the family that Gabriel was to be a painter."