Page:Dante and His Circle, with the Italian Poets Preceding Him.djvu/10

vi traits in his own poetry would be less intelligibly marked and less securely recognisable.

In the Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, published under my editorship in two volumes at the end of 1886, Dante and his Circle occupies the greater part of the second volume. The original poems occupy in like manner the greater part of the first volume. These latter were reprinted in a separate form in 1890; and it is now thought that there may perhaps be room for a similar separate form of Dante and his Circle. Any person who may possess these two works in this state of reissue will be entitled to say that he owns the great bulk of the writings upon which the literary reputation of Rossetti depends; though it is a fact that the Collected Works comprise in addition a considerable variety of other writings, chiefly in prose, which require to be taken into account by any such readers as are disposed for an accurate or complete study of him.

In my Preface to the Collected Works I have given a few details, which I shall here slightly amplify, regarding Dante and his Circle. Our father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a native of Vasto, in the Abruzzi. Being exiled from his own country in consequence of having taken a part in the liberal movement which led to the short-lived Neapolitan constitution of 1820–21, he settled in London towards 1824; and at once immersed himself in Dantesque studies. Of these the principal results were four books: the Inferno of Dante, with a Comento Analitico, 1826; Sullo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la Riforma, 1832; Il Mistero dell' Amor Platonico del Medio Evo, 1840; and La Beatrice di Dante, 1842. In all these works the dominant conception is that Dante, and