ROSE, WILLIAM STEWART (1775-1843).—­Poet and translator, s. of George R., who held various Government offices, including that of Treasurer of the Navy.  After being ed. at Eton and Camb., he was appointed Reading Clerk to the House of Lords.  He translated the romance of Amadis de Gaul (1803), Partenopex de Blois (1807), etc., and from 1823-31 was occupied with the principal work of his life, his translations from the Italian, including the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, in which he was encouraged by Sir W. Scott, whose friend he was.  He also produced a vol. of poems, The Crusade of St. Louis (1810).

ROSSETTI, CHRISTINA GEORGINA (1830-1894).—­Poetess, sister of Dante Gabriel R. (q.v.), was b. in London, where she lived all her life.  She began to write poetry in early girlhood, some of her earliest verse appearing in 1850 in the Germ, the magazine of the pre-Raphaelites, of which her brother was one of the founders.  Her subsequent publications were Goblin Market and other Poems (1862), The Prince’s Progress (1866), A Pageant and other Poems (1881), and Verses (1893). New Poems (1896) appeared after her death. Sing-Song was a book of verses for children.  Her life was a very retired one, passed largely in attending on her mother, who lived until 1886, and in religious duties.  She twice rejected proposals of marriage.  Her poetry is characterised by imaginative power, exquisite expression, and simplicity and depth of thought.  She rarely imitated any forerunner, and drew her inspiration from her own experiences of thought and feeling.  Many of her poems are definitely religious in form; more are deeply imbued with religious feeling and motive.  In addition to her poems she wrote Commonplace and other Stories, and The Face of the Deep, a striking and suggestive commentary on the Apocalypse.

ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL (1828-1882).—­Poet and painter, was b. in London.  His f. was Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian scholar, who came to England in 1824, and was Prof. of Italian in King’s Coll., London.  His mother was Frances Polidori, English on her mother’s side, so that the poet was three-fourths Italian, and one-fourth English.  He was ed. at King’s Coll.  School, and began the systematic study of painting in 1842, and in 1848, with Holman Hunt, Millais, and others, founded the pre-Raphaelite school of painting.  In 1849 he exhibited the “Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” and among his other pictures are “Beata Beatrix,” “Monna Vanna,” and “Dante’s Dream.”  Simultaneously with art he worked hard at poetry, and by 1847 he had written The Blessed Damozel and Hand and Soul (both of which appeared in the Germ, the magazine of the pre-Raphaelites), Retro me Sathanas, The Portrait, and The Choice, and in 1861 he brought out a vol. of translations from the early Italian poets under the title of Dante and