Gabriele Rossetti's Rigors of Rome: A Translation‪.‬

Introduction Gabriele Rossetti (1785-1854), the father of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, remains a powerful background figure in the study of Victorian poetry. Although he is commonly alluded to as a "Neapolitan exile," he was actually born in Vasto in Abruzzo Citeriore. He is a notable figure in Italian history and literature, and many streets and boulevards in his native country have been named in his honor. Upon his death, his son Dante Gabriel composed the poignant sonnet "On thy Bowed Head, My Father, Fell the Night." (For an in-depth study of this poem, see my essay "Gabriele Rossetti: 'On thy Bowed Head, My Father, Fell the Night'," in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 5.2, May 1985, 81-99.) A worthwhile book for readers of Italian is Maria-Luisa Giartosio de Courten's I Rossetti: storia di una famiglia (Milano: Alpes, 1928). Waller's bibliography in his biography is of paramount value, particularly its entries relating to Rossetti's massoneria (freemasonry), which, in contradistinction to the freemasonry found in English-speaking countries, was that of the Scottish Rite. Scottish Rite freemasonry pervades Latin countries and is radically Liberal and anticlerical. The Roman Catholic counterpart to Scottish Rite freemasonry is Opus Dei. (See Paul J. Longo, "Escriva's Opus Dei: From Secular Association to Personal Prelature," The American Benedictine Review, 40.2 [June 1989], 190-203.) Pope Leo XII's encyclical Humanum Genus (The Human Race, 20 April 1884), on freemasonry, should be read by any serious student of Victorian literature, who will then be able to see more clearly, for example, the real significance of the theory behind Matthew Arnold's strategy of "defecation" (his word for the purging of superstitious practices given sacramental and dogmatic status by Roman ecclesiastics), which aimed at dismissing Catholic specifics as Aberglaube. Also of considerable interest is the chapter on Rossetti in Gabrielle Festing's John Hookham Frere and His Friends (London: Nisbet, 1899).