ecclesiastical opinions of Swinburne and, in 1881, had in preparation a volume of Democratic Sonnets, but their revolutionary sentiments alarmed Dante Gabriel, who feared for his brother's dismissal from the civil service, and they were withheld from publication till 1907.
From 1870 to 1873 Rossetti edited Edward Moxon's series of popular poets, reprinting the introductions in Lives of Some Famous Poets (1878). A review of this is included in Swinburne's Miscellanies. He introduced Walt Whitman to the British public in a volume of selections (1868). In 1870 he issued an edition of Shelley in two volumes (revised edition, 3 vols., 1878), and in 1874 an edition of Blake in the ‘Aldine Poets’ series. He was an active member of the Shelley Society, founded in 1886, and contributed papers afterwards privately printed. In 1887 he wrote a Life of Keats for the ‘Great Writers’ series.
The deaths of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1882 and Christina Rossetti in 1894 gave William Rossetti scope for that biographical and editorial work by which he will be best remembered. Editions by him of his brother's collected works appeared in 1886, 1891, 1904, and 1911, as well as various critical studies; but it was only after waiting in vain for thirteen years for the promised biography of his brother by Theodore Watts-Dunton [q.v.], that Rossetti set about the Memoir, with Family-Letters (2 vols., 1895). His services to Christina Rossetti are the editions of New Poems (1896), Collected Poems, with a memoir (1904), and Family-Letters (1908). He also published a blank-verse translation (1901) of his father's Italian ‘versified autobiography’. It is not necessary to share either his sense of his brother's importance or his careful detachment from his sister's religion to find his loyalty and candour admirable, and his detachment amusing, in no derisive sense. He suppressed nothing but what the rights of the living demanded, and he was scrupulously just.
He followed the tradition of his family's devotion to Dante by a blank-verse translation (1865) of the Inferno, by the translation of the prose-arguments in his brother's version (1861) of the Vita Nuova, and by a study of Dante and his Convito, with translations (1910). In 1891 he delivered the Taylorian lecture at Oxford, on Leopardi. He was amongst the earliest workers on the Oxford English Dictionary; he edited certain texts (1866, 1869) for the Early English Text Society, and for the Chaucer Society a comparison of Troilus and Criseyde with Boccaccio's Filostrato (2 parts, 1875, 1883).
In 1874 Rossetti married Emma Lucy [see Rossetti, Lucy Madox], daughter of Ford Madox Brown [q.v.], and by her he had two sons and three daughters. He died at 3 St. Edmund's Terrace, Primrose Hill, 5 February 1919. His wife predeceased him in 1894.
A portrait in oils (1864) by A. Legros is reproduced in Rossetti's Some Reminiscences, vol. i (1906), and a pencil-drawing (c 1846–1848), by D. G. Rossetti, in the Family-Letters of D. G. Rossetti, vol. ii.
[The Times, 6 February 1919; British Museum Catalogue; private information.]
ROTHSCHILD, Sir NATHAN MEYER, second baronet, and first Baron Rothschild of Tring (1840–1915), banker and philanthropist, the eldest son of Lionel Nathan de Rothschild [q.v.], baron of the Austrian Empire, by his wife Charlotte, daughter of Baron Charles de Rothschild, of Naples, was born in London 8 November 1840. Destined for membership of the famous banking house of N. M. Rothschild and Sons, which had been established in London by his grandfather, Nathan Meyer Rothschild [q.v.], Nathan Rothschild was educated privately, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of King Edward VII, and afterwards in Germany. He left Cambridge without taking a degree.
Rothschild entered the House of Commons as liberal member for Aylesbury in 1865. He retained the representation of the borough and afterwards of the county division until his elevation to the peerage as a baron in 1885. He was the first professing Jew to become a member of the House of Lords. He had succeeded his uncle, Sir Anthony de Rothschild [q.v.], as second baronet in 1876, and his father as Austrian baron in 1879. On the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in 1886 Lord Rothschild joined the liberal unionists. Ranging himself behind the Marquess of Hartington (afterwards eighth Duke of Devonshire) [q.v.] on the Home Rule issue, he remained a loyal and, for the most part, silent member of the party. He gave the same statesman his support also when the questions of protection and imperial preference became a decisive issue in 1903. He served on several royal commissions, was created (1902) a privy councillor and G.C.V.O., and held the post of lord-lieutenant of Buckinghamshire from 1889 till his death.
Rothschild's support and advice, when--
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