Thanks to the deeply human element in his philosophy, Horace after nineteen centuries is one of the most modern of poets. He has been emphatically the guide of the man of the world, whose experience, as it broadens, more and more convinces him of the poet's truth. FitzGerald's Omar has the same modern tone, perhaps in a degree even higher. His necessitarianism is modern, his scepticism is modern, and the difficulties in which it arises are modern too. His stinging quatrains answer a theology familiar enough to the readers of Burns, and seem to breathe the spirit of the Scotch poet's satires on the Kirk: 'Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin Beset the Road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin! 'Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake: For all the Sin wherewith the face of Man Is blacken'd--Man's forgiveness give--and take!' Except perhaps in America, FitzGerald is not yet appreciated as he ought to be. When he is so appreciated he will rank only under the greatest of his time, and his chief work will be classed little below their best. CHAPTER XI. POETRY FROM 1850 TO 1870: THE PRE-RAPHAELITES; THE SPASMODIC SCHOOL; MINOR POETS. [Sidenote: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).] Contemporary with the great poets, who seem to feel first of all the imperative necessity of understanding and interpreting the intellectual movement of the age, were others, some of them great too, in whose work passion takes a prior place to intellect. Of these the most talented group were the Pre-Raphaelites, and the greatest man was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The celebrated founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a man who had the rare fortune to be highly distinguished in two arts. Other artists--Thomas Woolner and William Bell Scott and Sir Joseph Noel Paton are contemporary examples--have been poets also; but no one has attained a level at once as high and as equal in both as Rossetti. He has also been influential upon others in a degree rare even among men of as great calibre; and finally, he was only the greatest of a family all highly gifted in literature.