was set as a school copy for every young romanticist in turn to try his ’prentice hand upon.  Fortunately, Rossetti’s translation has perished, as has also his version—­some hundred lines—­of the earlier portion of the “Nibelungenlied.”  But a translation which he made about the same time of the old Swabian poet, Hartmann von Aue’s “Der Arme Heinrich” (Henry the Leper) is preserved, and was first published in 1886.  This poem, it will be remembered, was the basis of Longfellow’s “Golden Legend” (1851).  Rossetti did not keep up his German, and in later years he never had much liking for Scandinavian or Teutonic literature.  He was a Latin, and he made it his special task to interpret to modern Protestant England whatever struck him as most spiritually intense and characteristic in the Latin Catholic Middle Age.  The only Italian poet whom he “earnestly loved” was Dante.  He did not greatly care for Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso—­the Renaissance poets—­though in boyhood he had taken delight in Ariosto, just as he had in Scott and Byron.  But that was a stage through which he passed; none of these had any ultimate share in Rossetti’s culture.  At fifteen he wrote a ballad entitled “Sir Hugh the Heron,” founded on a tale of Allan Cunningham, but taking its name and motto from the lines in “Marmion”—­

  “Sir Hugh the Heron bold,
  Baron of Twisell and of Ford,
  And Captain of the Hold.”

A few copies of this were printed for family circulation by his fond grandfather, G. Polidori.  Among French writers he had no modern favourites beyond Hugo, Musset, and Dumas.  But like all the neo-romanticists, he was strongly attracted by Francois Villon, that strange Parisian poet, thief, and murderer of the fifteenth century.  He made three translations from Villon, the best known of which is the famous “Ballad of Dead Ladies” with its felicitous rendering of the refrain—­

  “But where are the snows of yester year?”
   (Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?)

There are at least three good English verse renderings of this ballad of Villon; one by Andrew Lang; one by John Payne, and doubtless innumerable others, unknown to me or forgotten.  In fact, every one translates it nowadays, as every one used to translate Buerger’s ballad.  It is the “Lenore” of the neo-romanticists.  Rossetti was a most accomplished translator, and his version of Dante’s “Vita Nuova” and of the “Early Italian Poets” (1861)—­reissued as “Dante and His Circle” (1874)—­is a notable example of his skill.  There are two other specimens of old French minstrelsy, and two songs from Victor Hugo’s “Burgraves” among his miscellaneous translations; and William Sharp testifies that Rossetti at one time thought of doing for the early poetry of France what he had already done for that of Italy, but never found the leisure for it.[16] Rossetti had no knowledge of Greek, and “the only classical poet,” says his brother, “whom he took to in any degree