In Italy the poems of Gabriele Rossetti have enjoyed a large amount of celebrity, and they are still held in honoured remembrance; his prose works are there known rather by rumour than in perusal. In England the case of the prose works is much the same, while the poems are as good as unknown. His life has never been written on any very complete scale. In Italian there are some Memoirs, more or less detailed and accurate—perhaps the most solid is that written by my cousin Teodorico Pietrocola-Rossetti; in English, the nearest approach to an account of him may be what appears in the course of my Memoir of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1895). There is also some important information in the book, John Hookham Frere and his Friends, mentioned on p. 132 of the present volume.

The name of Gabriele Rossetti has in this country secured some amount of respectful regard, but rather on adventitious than on strictly personal grounds. He is contemplated in his paternal relation—the father of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Dr Garnett, in his History of Italian Literature, has expressed the point neatly, and in terms stronger than it would behove me to use: “Rossetti assuredly will not be forgotten by England, for which he has done what no other inhabitant of these isles ever did, in begetting two great poets.”

On me it can be no less than a filial obligation to do what I can for the memory of my patriotic, highly gifted, laborious, and loving father. I therefore offer to the British public the following authentic record of him, and leave it to obtain such readers as it may.

W. M. ROSSETTI.

London, January 1901.