the sum-total of all the English
poetry written in imitation of the worst forms of this French excess was
probably less than one hundred lines; that what was really reprehensible
in the English imitation of the poetry of the French School was,
therefore, too inconsiderable to justify a wholesale charge against it
of an endeavour to raise the banner of a black ambition whose only aim
was to ruin society; that Rossetti, who was made to bear the brunt
of attack, was a man who never by direct avowal, or yet by inference,
displayed the faintest conceivable sympathy with the French excesses in
question, and who never wrote a line inspired by unwholesome passion.
As the pith of Mr. Buchanan's accusation of 1871 lay here, and as Mr.
Buchanan has, since then, very manfully withdrawn it, {*} we need hardly
go further; but, as more recent articles in prominent places,
_The Edinburgh Review, The British Quarterly Review, and again The
Contemporary Review_, have repeated what was first said by him on the
alleged unwholesomeness of Rossetti's poetic impulses, it may be as well
to admit frankly, and at once (for the subject will arise in the future
as frequently as this poetry is under discussion) that love of bodily
beauty did underlie much of the poet's work. But has not the same
passion made the back-bone of nine-tenths of the noblest English poetry
since Chaucer? If it is objected that Rossetti's love of physical
beauty took new forms, the rejoinder is that it would have been equally
childish and futile to attempt to prescribe limits for it. All this
we grant to those unfriendly critics who refuse to see that spiritual
beauty and not sensuality was Rossetti's actual goal.

* Writing to me on this subject since Rossetti's death, Mr.
Buchanan says:--"In perfect frankness, let me say a few
words concerning our old quarrel. While admitting freely
that my article in the C. R. was unjust to Rossetti's claims
as a poet, I have ever held, and still hold, that it
contained nothing to warrant the manner in which it was
received by the poet and his circle. At the time it was
written, the newspapers were full of panegyric; mine was a
mere drop of gall in an ocean of _eau sucree_. That it could
have had on any man the effect you describe, I can scarcely
believe; indeed, I think that no living man had so little to
complain of as Rossetti, on the score of criticism. Well, my
prote