Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/505

 many editions in England and abroad, and the inorganic portion of his Treatise on Chemistry (1877), written with Carl Schorlemmer, has been revised through several editions and remains a standard work. From a study of Dalton's laboratory note-books he published (with Dr. Arthur Harden) A New View of the Origin of Dalton's Atomic Theory (1896), showing that the law of multiple proportions was not the genesis but the sought-for confirmation of the idea of chemical atoms.

Roscoe was active in founding the Society of Chemical Industry (1880) and was its first president; he was also president of the Chemical Society (1881–1883), and of the British Association at Manchester in 1887. From 1878 he forwarded the movement to make the Owens College a university for Lancashire, but the opposition of other interests led to the establishment (1880) of the federal Victoria University, to which the Liverpool and Leeds colleges were afterwards admitted. In 1903–1904 the federated colleges received separate charters. Appointed vice-chancellor of London University in 1896, he took an active part in its reconstitution. The same year he became chairman of the 1851 Exhibition scholarship committee; in 1901 he joined the executive of the Carnegie Trust.

Roscoe served on the royal commission on technical instruction (1882–1884) which led to the Technical Instruction Act of 1889 and to the partial appropriation of the ‘whiskey money’ to technical education. Knighted for his services in 1884, he was elected M.P. in the liberal interest for South Manchester in 1885 and resigned the chair of chemistry at Owens College. Roscoe promoted legislation on ventilation in weaving-sheds, on sewage disposal, and on the legalization of the metric system; he asked for and served on a commission to report on Pasteur's treatment of hydrophobia, and from the first was a governor of the Lister Institute. In 1895 he began experimenting on the intermittent filtration of sewage—a process that has been largely adopted. He was made a privy councillor in 1909.

Roscoe married in 1863 Lucy (died 1910), daughter of Edmund Potter, M.P.; one son and two daughters were born of the marriage. He died at Woodcote, his summer home near Leatherhead, Surrey, 18 December 1915.

ROSS, MARTIN (pseudonym), novelist. [See Martin, Violet Florence.]

 ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL (1829–1919), man of letters and art-critic, the second son and third child of Gabriele Rossetti, and brother of Christina Georgina Rossetti [q.v.] and Dante Gabriel Rossetti [q.v.], was born in London at 38 Charlotte Street (now Hallam Street), Portland Place, 25 September 1829, and educated with his brother at King's College School, London. In 1845 he entered the Excise Office (which became later the Inland Revenue Board), where he remained till his retirement in 1894, having attained (in 1869) the position of senior assistant secretary. From 1888 he acted as referee, for estate duty, of pictures and drawings, and he continued to hold this position till about 1905, after his retirement.

William Rossetti was the companion in boyhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his lifelong confidant, and to him were dedicated the Poems of 1870, ‘to so many of which, so many years back, he gave the first brotherly hearing’. But after boyhood and his youthful share in the ‘pre-Raphaelite’ movement, William Rossetti showed a marked intellectual detachment from all his family. He was one of the seven pre-Raphaelite ‘brothers’ and even made some slight practice of painting. He edited The Germ (1850), the organ of the brotherhood, and wrote the sonnet printed on the cover of each of its four issues; in it he reviewed Clough's Bothie and Matthew Arnold's Strayed Reveller. During the following years he wrote art-criticisms for the Spectator and other papers, and republished them, revised, under the title Fine Art, chiefly Contemporary (1867). At a later date he contributed articles on art to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

On the death of his brother's wife in 1862, Rossetti joined his brother, Algernon Charles Swinburne [q.v.], and George Meredith [q.v.], in a short experiment in combined housekeeping at Tudor House, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. He published a discriminating defence in pamphlet-form of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) and jointly with him, wrote Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition (1868); to him Swinburne dedicated his essay on William Blake (1868). With his brother he had assisted Anne Gilchrist [q.v.] to edit her husband's Life of Blake in 1863. William Rossetti shared the republican and  479