Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/962

ment of the organic rule, was arrested with his companions, and transported to Orsova, and his wife, by her heroic efforts, effected his deliverance. In 1850 he took refuge in Paris, where he established various newspapers, and published several works supporting the cause of his country. Rossetti returned to his native country, and was in 1861 Minister of Public Instruction and of Worship at Jassy. A Liberal Deputy in the reign of Prince Charles, he was elected President of the Chamber in Nov., 1876, and, in concert with M. Bratiano, he induced Roumania to proclaim her independence, and to enter into an alliance with Russia, in order to make war on Turkey. In 1878 he was nominated Minister of the Interior, and he held that poet till Aug., 1880.

ROSSETTI, William Michael, brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina Georgina Rossetti, was born in London, Sept. 25, 1829, and educated at King's College School, London. He was appointed in Feb., 1845, to an extra Clerkship in the Excise Office, London (now the Inland Revenue Office), and became in July, 1869, Assistant-Secretary in the same office. In March, 1874, he married Lucy, elder daughter of Ford Madox Brown, the painter. She is an artist, and has exhibited at the Royal Academy. Mr. Rossetti has been a critic of fine art and literature since 1850. He acted in that capacity (principally as regards Fine Art) for the Critic, Spectator, Reader, Saturday Review, London Review, Chronicle (weekly), Fraser's Magazine, and the Academy. He was much mixed up (along with his brother, Millais, Holman Hunt, Woolner, and two others) in the "Pre-Raphælite" movement in fine art, from its commencement in 1848; edited and wrote in The Germ, the magazine got up by the Pre-Raphælites in 1850. He has published "Dante's Comedy, the Hell," translated into blank verse, highly literal, 1865; "Fine Art, chiefly Contemporary," 1867, a volume of republished criticisms; an edition of Shelley, 1870, with a memoir, and a large body of notes; this was in 2 vols., and was re-issued in 3 vols., revised, in 1878; " Lives of Famous Poets," 1878, being brief biographies of 23 British poets, from Chaucer to Longfellow, some of them reproduced from the series named "Moxon's Popular Poets," and others added. Mr. Rossetti edited this last-named series, 1870 to 1875, including 2 vols, of American poems and humorous poems, selected. He also edited, with a full memoir, the edition of Wm. Blake's Poems, in the Aldine series; and issued a selection, in 1868, of the Poems of Walt. Whitman; likewise works of different kinds, published by the Early English Text Society, and the Chaucer Society. Among his other works are a poem of modern life, in blank verse, entitled, "Mrs. Holmes Grey," published in The Broadway, about 1869; and a "Criticism of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads," 1866. Mr. Rossetti delivered in 1875 and 1876, at Birmingham and Newcastle-on-Tyne, lectures on Shelley's Life and Poems. Entertaining and expressing independent opinions on questions of art, literature, and other matters, Mr. Rossetti has frequently been in opposition to the drift of feeling at the moment, and has had the satisfaction of seeing, after a while, that public opinion came round much more nearly to what he had himself expressed.

ROSSI, Ernesto, an Italian actor, born at Leghorn, in 1829, received his early education in his native town, and afterwards studied law in the University of Pisa. Having a great liking for the stage, he used often to take a part in amateur theatricals, and also in the performances of a regular dramatic company—that of Marchi. Subsequently he entered the dramatic school which had just been founded