The fine line in the first canto of Rose Mary:

What glints there like a lance that flees?

appears as:

What glints there like a _glance_ that flees?

which is very painful nonsense; in the description of that graceful and
fanciful sonnet Autumn Idleness, the deer are represented as '_grazing_
from hillock eaves' instead of gazing from hillock-eaves; the opening of
Dantis Tenebrae is rendered quite incomprehensible by the substitution of
'my' for 'thy' in the second line; even such a well-known ballad as
Sister Helen is misquoted, and, indeed, from the Burden of Nineveh, the
Blessed Damozel, the King's Tragedy and Guido Cavalcanti's lovely
ballata, down to the Portrait and such sonnets as Love-sweetness,
Farewell to the Glen, and A Match with the Moon, there is not one single
poem that does not display some careless error or some stupid misprint.

As for Rossetti's elaborate system of punctuation, Mr. Knight pays no
attention to it whatsoever. Indeed, he shows quite a rollicking
indifference to all the secrets and subtleties of style, and inserts or
removes stops in a manner that is absolutely destructive to the lyrical
beauty of the verse. The hyphen, also, so constantly employed by
Rossetti in the case of such expressions as 'hillock-eaves' quoted above,
'hill-fire,' 'birth-hour,' and the like, is almost invariably
disregarded, and by the brilliant omission of a semicolon Mr. Knight has
succeeded in spoiling one of the best stanzas in The Staff and Scrip--a
poem, by the way, that he speaks of as The Staff and the Scrip (sic).
After this tedious comedy of errors it seems almost unnecessary to point
out that the earliest Italian poet is not called Ciullo D'Alcano (sic),
or that The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (sic) is not the title of Clough's
boisterous epic, or that Dante and his Cycle (sic) is not the name
Rossetti gave to his collection of translations; and why Troy Town should
appear in the index as Tory Town is really quite inexplicable, unless it
is intended as a compliment to Mr. Hall Caine who once dedicated, or
rather tried to dedicate, to Rossetti a lecture on the relations of poets
to politics. We are sorry, too, to find an English dramatic critic
misquoting Shakespeare, as we had always been of opinion that this was a
privilege reserved specially for our English actors. We sincerely hope
that there will soon be an end to all biographies of this kind. They rob
life of much of its dignity and its wonder, add to death itself a new
terror, and make one wish that all art were anonymous. Nor could there
have been any more unfortunate choice of a subject for popular treatment
than that to which we owe the memoir that now lies before us. 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.
One man alone, the friend his verse won for him, did he desire should
write his life, and it is to Mr. Theodore Watts that we, too, must look
to give us the real Rossetti. It may be admitted at once that Mr.
Watts's subject has for the moment been a little spoiled for him.