CHARLES DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

CHARLES DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882), poet and painter, born in London, the son of Gabriele Rossetti; was as a painter one of the PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD, and is characterised by Ruskin as "the chief intellectual force in the establishment of the modern romantic school in England,... as regarding the external world as a singer of the Romaunts would have regarded it in the Middle Ages, and as Scott, Burns, Byron, and Tennyson have regarded it in modern times," and as a poet was leader of the romantic school of poetry, which, as Stopford Brooke remarks, "found their chief subjects in ancient Rome and Greece, in stories and lyrics of passion, in mediæval romance, in Norse legends, in the old English of Chaucer, and in Italy".