A pillar of fire to the few who knew him, and of cloud to the many who knew him not, Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived apart from the gossip and tittle-tattle of a shallow age. He never trafficked with the merchants for his soul, nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to gape at. Passionate and romantic though he was, yet there was in his nature something of high austerity. He loved seclusion, and hated notoriety, and would have shuddered at the idea that within a few years after his death he was to make his appearance in a series of popular biographies, sandwiched between the author of Pickwick and the Great Lexicographer.
We sincerely hope that a few more novels like these will be published, as the public will then find out that a bad book is very dear at a shilling.
The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.
Shilling literature is always making demands on our credulity without ever appealing to our imagination.
Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature, and in art, as in politics, there is a great future for monsters.
It is only mediocrities and old maids who consider it a grievance to be misunderstood.
As truly religious people are resigned to everything, even to mediocre poetry, there is no reason at all why Madame Guyon’s verses should not be popular with a large section of the community.
A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.
Such novels as Scamp are possibly more easy to write than they are to read.
We have no doubt that when Bailey wrote to Lord Houghton that common-sense and gentleness were Keats’s two special characteristics the worthy Archdeacon meant extremely well, but we prefer the real Keats, with his passionate wilfulness, his fantastic moods and his fine inconsistence. Part of Keats’s charm as a man is his fascinating incompleteness.