To complain, as some have done, of the mediaeval quality of his subjects is foolish. As well complain that fairy tales are old. Rossetti was mediaeval in his thoughts and tastes. Without any affectation or straining for effect he lived his intellectual life in a mystical, richly-coloured world of romantic knights and ladies. These, and not the hedgerows or buttercups of to-day, were what came to the surface in his creative moods. We have witnessed in these latter years a great revival of romance, springing up in various ways all over the continent of Europe. Of this revival in England, on the side of pictorial art, Rossetti was the fountain head. The gentle melancholy that pervades his work was derived from his namesake Dante, to whom he was doubly allied by ties of birth and sentiment. "He was moreover driven by something like the same unrelaxing stress and fervour of temperament, so that even in middle age it seemed scarcely less true to say of Rossetti than of Dante himself: 'Like flame within the naked hand, His body bore his burning heart.'" The direction of his influence, and of the Pre-Raphaelite movement generally, has been worked out in a scholarly manner by Mr. Percy Bate, in a book called "The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters," where an attempt is made for the first time to trace the artistic lineage of such diverse executants as Mr. Spencer Stanhope, Mr. Walter Crane, Mr. Strudwick, Mrs. de Morgan, Mr. Byam Shaw, and others. On many of these the influence of Burne-Jones is more evident than that of Rossetti; but Burne-Jones himself owed much to Rossetti at the critical period of his career. The subject of Rossetti's art is one that presents difficulty, on account of the semi-privacy which surrounded it during the painter's lifetime. The subject of Rossetti himself is more difficult still. It has become a sort of fashion to decry the man, and to forget the genius, among some who knew him only in his latest years--perhaps by hearsay mainly. Stories of his want of consideration for others, his egotism, his shabby treatment of patrons, his ungoverned temper, are reeled off with a sort of zest, as though they summed up the man. But in Rossetti good and bad were, as usual, inextricably mixed up, with a strong preponderance towards the former. There were periods when his brilliant, impulsive, magnetic personality swamped the most audacious faults. For a man to stand out above his fellows is often enough a signal for petty jealousy and stone-throwing. But in such cases, one may remark, it is not always a David who prepares the sling, nor is it always the giant who is on the side of the Philistines. OUR ILLUSTRATIONS