APPENDIX
I have now said as much as I feel to be requisite by way of explaining and supplementing my father’s versified Autobiography, and shall proceed to give some further illustrative matter in the form of five Appendices.
1. Extracts from six of the domestic letters of Gabriele Rossetti.
2. Extracts from eight of those which he addressed to Mr Charles Lyell on the subject of his Dantesque and other literary researches.
3. Extracts from three letters of the Barone Kirkup regarding Dante, etc.
4. Twelve letters from Mazzini—all but one addressed to Rossetti.
5. Six specimens of Rossetti’s poetry.
Under each of these five headings I add a few explanatory remarks.
No. 1.—From Six Letters from Gabriele Rossetti to his Wife
I give these letters (translated by me) for what they are worth; not as being of any singular degree of interest in the topics which they raise, or in the mode of treating these, but chiefly for the purpose of showing what was the prevalent and constant tone of Rossetti in his family-relations. Two of his children, Dante Gabriel and Christina Georgina, have turned out to be of some moment to the British public, and some hint of their childish or youthful doings will be here found. In these letters I leave some gaps: in the great majority of cases this is only done because the omitted passages are of no importance. Holmer Green, the locality to which the first five letters are addressed, is in Buckinghamshire, near Little Missenden and Amersham: Gaetano Polidori, my maternal grandfather, along with his family, resided there for several years. The final letter was addressed to Mrs Rossetti at Brighton.