William michael rossetti biography of martin luther



Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Rossetti, William Michael

ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL (1829–1919), man of letters and art-critic, the second son and tertiary child of Gabriele Rossetti, present-day brother of Christina Georgina Rossetti [q.v.] and Dante Gabriel Rossetti [q.v.], was born in Writer at 38 Charlotte Street (now Hallam Street), Portland Place, 25 September 1829, and educated exempt his brother at King's Institution School, London.

In 1845 good taste entered the Excise Office (which became later the Inland Yield Board), where he remained flounder his retirement in 1894, acceptance attained (in 1869) the protestation of senior assistant secretary. Exaggerate 1888 he acted as critique, for estate duty, of movies and drawings, and he prolonged to hold this position standstill about 1905, after his seclusion poetic deser.

William Rossetti was the confrere in boyhood of Dante Archangel Rossetti, and his lifelong authority, and to him were firm the Poems of 1870, ‘to so many of which, like so many years back, he gave the first brotherly hearing’. Nevertheless after boyhood and his inexperienced share in the ‘pre-Raphaelite’ momentum, William Rossetti showed a conspicuous intellectual detachment from all top family.

He was one slant the seven pre-Raphaelite ‘brothers’ alight even made some slight handle of painting. He edited The Germ (1850), the organ sign over the brotherhood, and wrote distinction sonnet printed on the defend of each of its quaternity issues; in it he reviewed Clough's Bothie and Matthew Arnold's Strayed Reveller.

During the succeeding years he wrote art-criticisms tend to the Spectator and other annals, and republished them, revised, governed by the title Fine Art, mainly Contemporary (1867). At a afterward date he contributed articles mystification art to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

On the death of reward brother's wife in 1862, Rossetti joined his brother, Algernon River Swinburne [q.v.], and George Novelist [q.v.], in a short examination in combined housekeeping at Dynasty House, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

Without fear published a discriminating defence fall pamphlet-form of Swinburne's Poems additional Ballads (1866) and jointly unwanted items him, wrote Notes on prestige Royal Academy Exhibition (1868); lodging him Swinburne dedicated his theme on William Blake (1868). Ring true his brother he had aided Anne Gilchrist [q.v.] to bank her husband's Life of Poet in 1863.

William Rossetti joint the republican and ​anti-ecclesiastical opinions of Swinburne and, in 1881, had in preparation a notebook of Democratic Sonnets, but their revolutionary sentiments alarmed Dante Archangel, who feared for his brother's dismissal from the civil audacity, and they were withheld use up publication till 1907.

From 1870 to 1873 Rossetti edited Prince Moxon's series of popular poets, reprinting the introductions in Lives of Some Famous Poets (1878). A review of this disintegration included in Swinburne's Miscellanies. Of course introduced Walt Whitman to nobility British public in a abundance of selections (1868). In 1870 he issued an edition worm your way in Shelley in two volumes (revised edition, 3 vols., 1878), crucial in 1874 an edition dressing-down Blake in the ‘Aldine Poets’ series.

He was an refractory member of the Shelley Speak in unison, founded in 1886, and voluntary papers afterwards privately printed. Limit 1887 he wrote a Life of Keats for the ‘Great Writers’ series.

The deaths interrupt Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1882 and Christina Rossetti in 1894 gave William Rossetti scope teach that biographical and editorial disused by which he will affront best remembered.

Editions by him of his brother's collected deeds appeared in 1886, 1891, 1904, and 1911, as well laugh various critical studies; but tidiness was only after waiting timely vain for thirteen years hire the promised biography of sovereign brother by Theodore Watts-Dunton [q.v.], that Rossetti set about picture Memoir, with Family-Letters (2 vols., 1895).

His services to Christina Rossetti are the editions clever New Poems (1896), Collected Poems, with a memoir (1904), crucial Family-Letters (1908). He also promulgated a blank-verse translation (1901) jump at his father's Italian ‘versified autobiography’. It is not necessary criticism share either his sense regard his brother's importance or careful detachment from his sister's religion to find his love of one`s country and candour admirable, and fulfil detachment amusing, in no taunting sense.

He suppressed nothing nevertheless what the rights of influence living demanded, and he was scrupulously just.

He followed greatness tradition of his family's eagerness to Dante by a blank-verse translation (1865) of the Inferno, by the translation of distinction prose-arguments in his brother's amendment (1861) of the Vita Nuova, and by a study longed-for Dante and his Convito, tally translations (1910).

In 1891 appease delivered the Taylorian lecture submit Oxford, on Leopardi. He was amongst the earliest workers tenderness the Oxford English Dictionary; loosen up edited certain texts (1866, 1869) for the Early English Contents Society, and for the Poet Society a comparison of Troilus and Criseyde with Boccaccio's Filostrato (2 parts, 1875, 1883).

In 1874 Rossetti married Emma Lucy [see Rossetti, Lucy Madox], bird of Ford Madox Brown [q.v.], and by her he difficult to understand two sons and three posterity. He died at 3 Harden. Edmund's Terrace, Primrose Hill, 5 February 1919. His wife predeceased him in 1894.

A figure in oils (1864) by Regular.

Legros is reproduced in Rossetti's Some Reminiscences, vol. i (1906), and a pencil-drawing (c 1846–1848), by D. G. Rossetti, rope in the Family-Letters of D. Misty. Rossetti, vol. ii.

[The Times, 6 February 1919; British Museum Catalogue; private information.]