Poet and art-critic, brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina Georgina Rossetti; born in London on the 25th of September 1829, and educated at King’s College School, London. Mr. Rossetti, who long held a post in the English civil service, came to notice as a critic of fine art and literature in 1850. He was much engaged (together with his brother, Millais, Holman Hunt, Woolner and others) in “Pre-Raphaelite” art from its commencement in 1848; and he edited and wrote for The Germ, a magazine conducted by the Pre-Raphaelites in 1850. He published Dante’s Comedy, the Hell (translated into blank verse, 1865); Fine Art, Chiefly Contemporary (1867), a volume of republished criticisms; an edition of Shelley’s Poetical Works (1870; revised edition, 1878), with a memoir and a large body of notes; Lives of Famous Poets (1878), being brief biographies of British poets, from Chaucer to Tennyson, some of them reproduced from the series named Moxon’s Popular Poets, with others added; an edition of the Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1887); a Life of Keats (1887), in the series of Great Writers; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (1889). He also edited, with a memoir, William Blake’s Poems, in the Aldine series; and in 1868 issued a selection from the Poems of Walt Whitman. Among his other works are a poem of modern life, Mrs. Holmes Grey (1869); and a Criticism of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866). Mr. Rossetti delivered in 1875 a series of lectures on Shelley’s Life and Poems, and on The Wives of Poets. In 1890 he published a copiously annotated edition of Shelley’s Adonais in the Clarendon Press series; also editions at various times of Coleridge, Campbell, Keats and Milton. He also edited a collection of his sister, Christina Rossetti’s Poems (1896). He wrote the article on Shelley, in this Encyclopædia, and contributed more than a score of other articles, the most of them treating of Italian painters. (See authored articles: Fra Angelico, Ford Madox Brown, Antonio Canova, Lodovico, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, Benvenuto Cellini, Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, Giovanni Cimabue, Correggio, Carlo Crivelli, Carlo Dolci, Domenichino, William Dyce, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Copley Fielding, Il Francia, Henry Fuseli, Gaddi Thomas Gainsborough, Domenico Ghirlandajo, Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Benozzo Gozzoli, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir Peter Lely, Lippi, Claude Lorrain, Bernardino Luini, Andrea Mantegna, Simone Martini, Masaccio, Masolino da Panicale, Giovanni Battista Moroni, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Jacopo Palma, Parmigianino, Perino del Vaga, Pietro Perugino, Piero della Francesca, Guido Reni, Jusepe de Ribera, Giulio Romano, Salvator Rosa, Andrea del Sarto, Sebastiano del Piombo, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Luca Signorelli, Il Sodoma, Tintoretto, Titian, Paul Veronese, Vivarini, Francisco de Zurbarán.)
