ABSTRACT
in the latter half of the century the Italian Middle Age and Dante, its great exemplar, found new interpreters in the Rossetti family; a family well fitted by its mixture of bloods and its hereditary aptitudes, literary and artistic, to mediate between the English genius and whatever seemed to it alien or repellant in Dante’s system of thought. The father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a political refugee, who held the professorship of Italian in King’s College, London, from 1831 to 1845, and was the author of a commentary on Dante which carried the politico-allegorical theory of the “Divine Comedy” to somewhat fantastic lengths. The mother was half English and half Italian, a sister of Byron’s travelling companion, Dr. Polidori. Of the four children of the marriage, Dante Gabriel and Christina became poets of distinction. The eldest sister, Maria Francesca, a religious devotee who spent her last years as a member of a Protestant sisterhood, was the author of that unpretentious but helpful piece of Dante literature, “A Shadow of Dante.” The younger brother, William Michael, is well known as a biographer, littérateur, and art critic, as an editor of Shelley and of the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
