The article on Edoardo Fusco also is full of interest, and is a timely tribute to the memory of one who did so much for the education and culture of modern Italy.  On the whole, the book is well worth reading; so well worth reading, indeed, that we hope that the foolish remarks on the Greek Drama will be amended in a second edition, or, which would be better still, struck out altogether.  They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

(1) The Master of Tanagra.  Translated from the German of Ernst von Wildenbruch by the Baroness von Lauer. (H.  Grevel and Co.)

(2) Moliere et Shakespeare.  By Paul Stapfer. (Hachette.)

(3) Annals of the Life of Shakespeare. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)

(4) Poems by Allan Ramsay.  Selected and arranged, with a Biographical Sketch of the Poet, by J. Logie Robertson, M.A.  ‘Canterbury Poets.’  (Walter Scott.)

(5) Dante for Beginners.  By Arabella Shore. (Chapman and Hall.)

(6) Studies in Italian Literature.  By Miss Phillimore. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)

A CHEAP EDITION OF A GREAT MAN

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 18, 1887.)

Formerly we used to canonise our great men; nowadays we vulgarise them.  The vulgarisation of Rossetti has been going on for some time past with really remarkable success, and there seems no probability at present of the process being discontinued.  The grass was hardly green upon the quiet grave in Birchington churchyard when Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. William Sharp rushed into print with their Memoirs and Recollections.  Then came the usual mob of magazine-hacks with their various views and attitudes, and now Mr. Joseph Knight has produced for the edification of the British public a popular biography of the poet of the Blessed Damozel, the painter of Dante’s Dream.

It is only fair to state that Mr. Knight’s work is much better than that of his predecessors in the same field.  His book is, on the whole, modestly and simply written; whatever its other faults may be, it is at least free from affectation of any kind; and it makes no serious pretence at being either exhaustive or definitive.  Yet the best we can say of it is that it is just the sort of biography Guildenstern might have written of Hamlet.  Nor does its unsatisfactory character come merely from the ludicrous inadequacy of the materials at Mr. Knight’s disposal; it is the whole scheme and method of the book that is radically wrong.  Rossetti’s was a great personality, and personalities such as his do not easily survive shilling primers.  Sooner or later they have inevitably to come down to the level of their biographers, and in the present instance nothing could be more absolutely commonplace than the picture Mr. Knight gives us of the wonderful seer and singer whose life he has so recklessly essayed to write.