training; but he must have been getting his special mental education in his own way long before he left Oxford, for his Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, published monthly during the year 1856, teems with work from his own hand, saturated with medievalism. The profession of an architect being selected, he was articled to Street, but abandoned his articles. His first serious and independent appeal to the public as a man of letters was "The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems" (1858), although "Sir Galahad" had appeared separately a few months earlier; and long before his "Jason" came out he had founded, with the co-operation of Gabriel Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, and others, the commercial undertaking conducted under the style of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., fine art decorators-a business over which he presided up to the time of his death.

In literature, as in life and its varied pursuits, bis work divides itself into definite periods, of which the chrono logical minutiæ would be here misplaced. Considered in the light of a poet and story-teller, he may be said to have started on his career as an Anglo-Norman mediævalist, drawing, however, considerable inspiration from the Greek and Latin classics, and gradually, with a widening area of knowledge and reading, taking in at first hand influences from the sturdy literature of the Northmen who peopled Iceland. From the pure mediævalism of "The Defence of Guenevere," "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," "The Haystack in the Floods," and the Chaucerian classicism of "The Life and Death of Jason," (1867), we pass through "The Earthly Paradise" (1868-70) to find the flavor far more Northern at the end than at the beginning; the actual work of translating large Icelandic sagas in conjunction with Mr. Eric Magnusson had effected the change and had led to the transformation of one Icelandic prose masterpiece, the "Saga of the Laxdale Men," into that poetic masterpiece, "The Lovers of Gudrun," which closes the tale-cycle of

"The Earthly Paradise," and ends the first period.

"Love is Enough" (1873), a dramatic and lyric morality, derives the more marked features of its poetic method from the Icelandic; and it is to the second period that both this and several renderings of Icelandic sagas belong, though some of them remained in manuscript till a recent date. The period is that in which Morris shows a prevailing feeling of Northern hardiness, has abandoned the three Chaucerian stock metres, and developed a metric system with anapæstic movement surpassing in every vital particular all that has been done in anapæstic measures since Tennyson showed the way in "Maud.” In the much higher qualities, which derive from knowledge of life, feeling for national myth, epic action and tragic inteusity combined, "The Story of Sigurd the Volsung" (1877), the epic in anapæstic couplets which rounds this period, stands among the foremost poems not only of this century, but of our literature.

The third period, from 1878 to 1890, is chiefly an epoch of lectures, pamphlets, leaflets, and periodical press work; but the literary artist gradually gets the upper hand again. "Chants for Socialists," "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened," "The Pilgrims of Hope,” “A Dream of John Ball," and "News from Nowhere," are all works of art, though saturated with Socialist intention. The translation of the "Odyssey" in anapæstic couplets came out in this period (1887), which may be said to close in effect somewhat before the disruption of the Socialist League and the death, early in 1891, of its journal, the Commonweal, which contained less and less of Morris's work towards the close, though "News from Nowhere" in its first form appeared in the journal.

Meanwhile, 1889 had been signalized by a wholly new thing in literature-the wonderful myth-romance of the Goths and Romans called, "A Tale of the House of the Wolfings," chiefly in prose, but with a considerable mass of

poetry woven in: and here begins Mor- the handicraftsman's life joyful.
ris's last period in literary art. "The
Roots of the Mountains" (1889), a story
of the Goths and Huns, "The Glitter-
ing Plain" (1890-91), the revised "News
from Nowhere" (1891-92), "Poems by
the Way" (September, 1891), "The
Wood Beyond the World" (May, 1894),
"Beowulf" in English verse (done in
conjunction with the Rev. A. T. Wyatt,
January, 1895), “Child Christopher and
Goldilind the Fair" July, 1895), "The
Well at the World's End" (March,
1896), and several volumes of trans-
lations, from medieval French tales,
etc., form a mass of high-class
work, in all the original part of
which Morris has shown great grip
of character and intimate knowl-
edge of the doings of men and commu-
nities in various ages. Altogether,
counting "John Ball," here are eight
works of fiction in which this master
of all the leading crafts that can be
named has devised a new method and
a fresh form of speech, has laid out
his stories with admirable clearness,
filled their fabric with beautiful le-
gends, or visions of what has been and
what may be, and created a living gal-
lery of men and women, all unmistak-
able in the differentia of their charac-
ters and personalities. If there were
no first, second, and third periods at
all, these books of his fourth, and, alas!
final period, would alone suffice to se-
cure him a place among the greatest
literary artists of the age, and, indeed,
of the world.

Leaving literature aside, the epochs of his life are so many important chapters in the history of arts and crafts in England, and in the social and political movement which is still going on for the benefit of the handicraftsman. Not to be too nicely discriminative, there is the period when he started his undertaking on æsthetic grounds to reform our views of color, curve, line, texture-in a word, our tastes. This threw him into those relations with handicraftsmen which could lead his generous heart but one way-to make

In

of

developing his views for the workmen, he enlarged his scope; from importing rough but comely pottery out France, he got to influencing the manufacture and securing the distribution of de Morgan lustre a lost art revived. From bringing home Eastern carpets he grew to see that after all these were not the fittest and best for a Western civilization, and he set up his dye-works and looms and made fabrics and carpets which will influence the taste of the Western world when he has been dead a century. He entered into the practical side of the Socialist propaganda and went on fearlessly till convinced not that he would come to harm, but that "ructions with police," as he phrased it, would injure the cause. Lastly, he saw what a base, mechanical thing was become this great art of printing of ours; and he set up the Kelmscott Press, to issue books in which every letter should be beautiful. He had his own hand-made paper made from pure linen rag, set up handpresses, obtained the best of ink, employed the best labor he could get, and set good binders to put his sheets together in seemly vellum or parchment; and he issued a great series of masterpieces in the art of printing. Many of his own fourth-period books appeared first in this sumptuous form; and now, as he lies at peace in the quiet little Oxfordshire village which gives his press its name, the fortunate possessors of the great folio Chaucer edited by his old friend Frederick Ellis and beautified by the lovely pictures of his older friend Edward Burne-Jones, whom he playfully called "the Baronet," are turning in wonder the pages of the noblest book ever printed. It is good to temper our grief with the thought that the brave man and great artist who crammed the joyous labor of three lifetimes into sixty-two years and a half, to benefit his humbler fellow-craftsmen, saw with his eyes this crowning work of many applied arts and crafts before he entered into his rest.

H. BUXTON FORMAN.

From The Speaker.
GOLDSMITH'S CONVERSATION.

There is no triter quotation from Bos-
well than that of Goldsmith's retort to
the ridicule that Johnson poured upon
him for his contention that it was diffi-
cult to make little fishes in fables talk
in character. "Why, Mr. Johnson, this
is not so easy as you seem to think; for
if you were to make little fishes talk
they would all talk like whales." The
complementary difficulty of getting
great whales to understand the prattle
of little fishes explains much of the
social contempt of the Club for Gold-
smith. An Irishman in England talks
generally too much, too fast, too
lightly, too discursively; but talk of this
kind seems idiotic only when taken se-
riously. If you insist on handling a
soap-bubble, its grace, lightness, and
iridescence disappear; and in the Club
a soap-bubble was solemnly weighed
and found wanting. Even Burke could
not blow one with impunity. "When
Burke does not condescend to be merry,
his conversation is very superior in-
deed. When he lets himself down to
that he is in the kennel," says Johnson
of jocularity which Windham, Rey-
nolds and even Boswell himself thought
admirable. Burke, however, was not
disconcerted by the failure of his flashes
of merriment, whereas Goldsmith was.
From his earliest childhood his natural
self-distrust had been deepened to mor-
bidity by the taunts of friends, rela-
tives, schoolmates and masters. He
was pitiably conscious of his ugliness,
́his awkwardness, his “brogues and his
blunders," and in uncongenial society
this disconcerting self-consciousness ag-
gravated these defects in its endeavor
to conceal them. When he uttered in
such society those random absurdities
that an Irishman in high spirits some-
times lets escape him, like steam from
a safety-valve, the stolid stare of his
matter-of-fact audience disconcerted
him. Instead, however, of reducing
him to a safe silence, it but stimulated
him to such stumbling and staggering
attempts to regain his lost foot-hold as
- sank him deeper in the bog.
initial stupidity was not his.

But the

Let us

take three characteristic specimens of this initial stupidity in order to suggest that Goldsmith was not altogether to blame if he failed to play a brilliant game of fives against a haystack. "Sir," replied Cooke to Sam Rogers' inquiry as to Goldsmith's conversation, "Sir, he was a fool. The right word never came to him. If you gave him a bad shilling, he'd say, 'Why, it's as good a shilling as ever was born.' You know he ought to have said 'coined.' 'Coined,' sir, never entered his head. He was a fool, sir." Cooke was himself an Irishman, while Mrs. Thrale, who shall be put into the box next, will be allowed to come as near, in the matter of frivolity, to the level of the average Irish mind as any Englishwoman could. Here is her instance of "Poor Dr. Goldsmith's" idiocy: "Poor Dr. Goldsmith said once, 'I would advise every young fellow setting out in life to love gravy.' alleging for it the serious reason that a glutton once disinherited his nephew because of his unconquerable distaste to that condiment." If Mrs. Thrale had come upon this advice where it had originally appeared-in Goldsmith's burlesque specimen of a magazine in miniature-it is just possible that she might have understood it to be a joke. No such Bottom prologue could save the sage Boswell from maliciously misunderstanding the most obvious of jokes, since "the Jessamy Bride," in telling the following anec. dote, spoke of the sally of Goldsmith's as unmistakably playful. She and her sister, while standing with Goldsmith at the window of an hotel, attracted by their loveliness the admiration of a passing company of soldiers. "I, too, have my admirers elsewhere," cried the poet in affected pique. This light and luckless jest had but to pass through the dense mind of Boswell to come out a petulant outburst of envy, as gas under tremendous pressure is transmuted into a grosser element. "When accompanying two beautiful ladies with their mother on a tour in France," writes Boswell, "Goldsmith was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him."

V. SOME LANDLADIES OF FICTION,

VI. MAN BEFORE WRITING,

VII. TEA-TIME IN THE VILLAGE. By M. E.

VIII. ABOUT FEASTS AND HOLIDAYS. Trans-

lated for THE LIVING AGE,

IX. PHILIP II. IN HIS DOMESTIC RELATIONS.

By Martin A. S. Hume,

XII. THE ART OF GEORGE DU MAURIER,

XIII. ON LIVING IN THE COUNTRY,

GEORGE DU MAURIER,

READINGS FROM AMERICAN