[In the following review, the critic offers a favorable assessment of Caine's autobiography.]

It is a curious commentary on the literary life that the one chapter of Hall Caine's memoirs [My Story] to rouse wide discussion in England was the account of his income at the beginning of his career. One would never guess, from this discussion of pounds and pence, that the heart of the book was an intimate story of Rossetti's life in that muffled house at No. 16 Cheyne Walk and of his two incursions into the country for health. These memoirs, in fact, are merely the outcome, as Mr. Caine states in his introduction, of a desire to enlarge the little volume of recollections of Rossetti published immediately after the poet's death. Mr. Caine was a young clerk in Liverpool when he first attracted Rossetti's attention by a printed lecture in support of the morals of Rossetti's verse—just then a tender point with the author. A brisk correspondence ensued, chiefly on literary topics, half of which we shall no doubt have in print some day. For Rossetti's letters are preserved and make a bulk of writing greater than all his published works. Then the younger man went to live with the elder and was at his side through all the trying months until Rossetti's death.

There is little that is new in the picture of Rossetti as we now get it. He was ailing in body, suffering from his chloral habit, convinced of a general conspiracy against him, a melancholy recluse, yet still showing on occasions those flashes of intellectual power that so imposed on all his contemporaries. Nothing is more remarkable to one who reads largely in the letters and memoirs of the middle Victorian period now appearing so rapidly, than the dominance of Rossetti over all who came in contact with him, and the extent of his influence. It is as another testimony to this force that Mr. Caine's work will owe its chief interest. On some points he is a valuable witness. He denies the rumor that the melancholy death of the poet's wife was the result of bitterness over Rossetti's wild courses, but he says nothing to dispel the belief that this fragile creature simply withered away in the atmosphere of overloaded thought and emotion for which she was totally unfit. It was this, we believe, rather than neglect or knowledge of Rossetti's vain love for another woman, that killed her. When Mr. Caine raises Rossetti “into the place of one of the great tragic figures of literature, one of the great lovers whose lives, as well as their works, speak to the depth of their love or the immensity of their remorse”—we are inclined to think the writer is putting some of his novelist's art to use, and our opinion is confirmed by such overstrung words as these:

Thus, too, the solitude of his [Rossetti's] last years, with its sleepless nights and its delusions born of indulgence in the drug, was not the result of morbid brooding over the insults of adverse critics, but of a deep-seated, if wholly unnecessary, sense as of a curse resting on him and on his work, whereof the malignity of criticism was only one of many manifestations.

The course of Rossetti's life was too nearly that of the typical ultra-romantic to need explanation by such an hypothesis of lasting love and remorse. One error of statement needs correction. Rossetti did not become acquainted with Burne-Jones and William Morris when he went to Oxford to paint the walls of the Union. He had been living in the closest intimacy with them in London before they undertook together that wild knight-errantry of art.

For the rest, Mr. Caine gives some fairly entertaining chapters on Ruskin, Wilkie Collins, Robert Buchanan, and others, and an altogether undue number of letters from these great men in praise of his own works of fiction. Perhaps the most striking minor portrait is that of Henry Irving playing a rôle in life as on the stage.