The historical sense was weak in Rossetti.  It is not easy to imagine him composing a Waverley novel.  The life of the community, as distinct from the life of the individual, had little interest for him.  The mellifluous names of his heroines, Aloyse, Rose Mary, Blanchelys, are pure romance.  In his intense concentration upon the aesthetic aspects of every subject, Rossetti seemed, to those who came in contact with him, singularly borne.  He was indifferent to politics, society, speculative thought, and the discoveries of modern science—­to contemporary matters in general.[23] It is to this narrow aestheticism that Mr. Courthope refers when, in comparing Coleridge and Keats with Rossetti and Swinburne, he finds in the latter an “extraordinary skill in the imitation of antique forms,” but “less liberty of imagination.” [24] The contrast is most striking in the case of Coleridge, whose intellectual interests had so wide a range.  Rossetti cared only for Coleridge’s verse; William Morris spoke with contempt of everything that he had written except two or three of his poems;[25] and Swinburne regretted that he had lost himself in the mazes of theology and philosophy, instead of devoting himself wholly to creative work.  Keats, it is true, was exclusively preoccupied with the beautiful; but he was more eclectic than Rossetti—­perhaps also than Morris, though hardly than Swinburne.  The world of classic fable, the world of outward nature were as dear to his imagination as the country of romance.  Rossetti was not university bred, and, as we have seen, forgot his Greek early.  Morris, like Swinburne, was an Oxford man; yet we hear him saying that he “loathes all classical art and literature.” [26] In “The Life and Death of Jason” and “The Earthly Paradise” he treats classical and mediaeval subjects impartially, but treats them both alike in mediaeval fashion; as Chaucer does, in “The Knightes Tale.” [27] As for Rossetti, he is never classical.  He makes Pre-Raphaelite ballads out of the tale of Troy divine and the Rabbinical legends of Adam’s first wife, Lilith; ballads with quaint burdens—­

  “(O Troy’s down,
  Tall Troy’s on fire)”;

  “(Sing Eden Bower! 
  Alas the hour!)”

and whose very titles have an Old English familiarity—­“Eden Bower,” “Troy Town,” as who says “London Bridge,” “Edinboro’ Town,” etc.  Swinburne has given the rationale of this type of art in his description of a Bacchus and Ariadne by Lippino Lippi ("Old Masters at Florence"), “an older legend translated and transformed into mediaeval shape.  More than any others, these painters of the early Florentine school reproduce in their own art the style of thought and work familiar to a student of Chaucer and his fellows or pupils.  Nymphs have faded into fairies, and gods subsided into men.  A curious realism has grown up out of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could not but falsify whatever