quoted above, ‘hill-fire,’ ‘birth-hour,’ and the like, is almost invariably disregarded, and by the brilliant omission of a semicolon Mr. Knight has succeeded in spoiling one of the best stanzas in The Staff and Scrip—­a poem, by the way, that he speaks of as The Staff and the Scrip (sic).  After this tedious comedy of errors it seems almost unnecessary to point out that the earliest Italian poet is not called Ciullo D’Alcano (sic), or that The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (sic) is not the title of Clough’s boisterous epic, or that Dante and his Cycle (sic) is not the name Rossetti gave to his collection of translations; and why Troy Town should appear in the index as Tory Town is really quite inexplicable, unless it is intended as a compliment to Mr. Hall Caine who once dedicated, or rather tried to dedicate, to Rossetti a lecture on the relations of poets to politics.  We are sorry, too, to find an English dramatic critic misquoting Shakespeare, as we had always been of opinion that this was a privilege reserved specially for our English actors.  We sincerely hope that there will soon be an end to all biographies of this kind.  They rob life of much of its dignity and its wonder, add to death itself a new terror, and make one wish that all art were anonymous.  Nor could there have been any more unfortunate choice of a subject for popular treatment than that to which we owe the memoir that now lies before us.  A pillar of fire to the few who knew him, and of cloud to the many who knew him not, Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived apart from the gossip and tittle-tattle of a shallow age.  He never trafficked with the merchants for his soul, nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to gape at.  Passionate and romantic though he was, yet there was in his nature something of high austerity.  He loved seclusion, and hated notoriety, and would have shuddered at the idea that within a few years after his death he was to make his appearance in a series of popular biographies, sandwiched between the author of Pickwick and the Great Lexicographer.  One man alone, the friend his verse won for him, did he desire should write his life, and it is to Mr. Theodore Watts that we, too, must look to give us the real Rossetti.  It may be admitted at once that Mr. Watts’s subject has for the moment been a little spoiled for him.  Rude hands have touched it, and unmusical voices have made it sound almost common in our ears.  Yet none the less is it for him to tell us of the marvel of this man whose art he has analysed with such exquisite insight, whose life he knows as no one else can know it, whom he so loyally loved and tended, and by whom he was so loyally beloved in turn.  As for the others, the scribblers and nibblers of literature, if they indeed reverence Rossetti’s memory, let them pay him the one homage he would most have valued, the gracious homage of silence.  ’Though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me,’ says Hamlet to his false friend, and even so might Rossetti speak to those well-intentioned mediocrities who would seem to know his stops and would sound him to the top of his compass.  True, they cannot fret him now, for he has passed beyond the possibility of pain; yet they cannot play upon him either; it is not for them to pluck out the heart of his mystery.