emphatically men of to-day. Their homes were for the most part under the low skies of great cities; their minds were minds stimulated and cultured by the dense pressure of the intellectual life that surged around. Burne-Jones and Morris, both at the critical turning-point of their developement, underwent the stimulus of Oxford companionships. Rossetti found in his own family the spur of keen and educated criticism, while, in years to come, the roll-call of their closest friends and companions embraced the foremost names in literature and art. And as denizens of that inner world that each man makes for himself within the compass of the world which surrounds him, they were stirred--whether to the recoil of the reactionist or the agreement of the participant matters little-by the vast waves of human thought and human feeling that vibrated around them, by the emanation of the multitudinous lives by which their lives were enclosed.

Outside the studios where Rossetti and Burne-Jones, in passive retreat from contact with the busy forces of modern existence, invoked image after image of medieval tradition— dreams of dead gods, visions of fair women, where, by whatever name they named her, 'la femme est toujours l'Hélène 'd'autrefois 'the intricate network of London spread far and wide. They trod daily its crowded pavements, where, with an unsurpassed accentuation, luxury and wealth, penury and hardship, the Dives and the Lazarus of the street are confronted, suggesting problems no man may solve and summoning as with a trumpet call their wide-hearted fellow-artist to enrol himself in the ranks of Socialism. Beyond their doors every stratum of humanity might be found exhibiting each its special features; hunger and remedyless want, with all the nameless maladies of a rank and overgrown civilisation written in indelible signatures upon face after face, haunt the threshold of the London dweller. Nightmares of women and children and vagrant menace or appeal to him in the gas-glare of thronged crossings, or in the scantly peopled highways in London's 'smokeless resurrection light,' printing themselves vaguely on the memory to revive in dim sensations or unformulated thoughts. So day by day in Bloomsbury, in Kensington, in Chelsea, the complicated artificialities of city life encircled Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris, shutting them out, with mental barriers all city dwellers recognise, from contact with simpler conditions of existence; estranging them, as city life estranges, from the hourly

influences of nature's elemental powers, from the contagious moods of earth's multiform vitalities, from the companionship of its children, from the intimacy of its woods, from the solitude of its expanses of plain and sea, from the sound of its innumerable voices, from the indefinite emotion-the communion of its infinitely varied silences.

And while in the outer semblances of an art determinatively ideal and imaginative, the actualities of the material world which lay around the house in Cheyne Walk or outside the garden walls of the Grange in North End Road, found no place; while the dominatively subjective tendency of their art intensified and concentrated its individuality, the emotional expression, the sentiment, spiritual or-in its widest significance-sensual, which both Rossetti and Burne-Jones stamped upon their creations, was no less the offspring of the influences around them than was the sterile dream of a social redemption with art for its Christ that cast its ennobling radiance over Morris's later years.

The lives of Rossetti and William Morris are compiled upon a widely differing scheme. As a personal narrative the record of Dante Gabriel Rossetti stands alone, even among modern memoirs, in its detail of intimate and private episode. In the life of William Morris it has been the intention of his biographer to do little more than supply an outline statement concerning all matters of domestic incident, and he has rarely abdicated the privilege of reticence which, in dealing with the lives of those who so recently dwelt in our midst, assumes the nature of an obligation never, perhaps, repudiated without loss. That a man is born, attains maturity, is married, has children, faces in hours of bereavement and sickness the inevitable end, are initial facts implying assuredly, if not inclusively, that a life has to a certain degree, and according to its individual capacity, been a completed experience of some of the stronger and deeper natural affections and emotions. The mere register of such circumstances and events indicates, so far as parallel lines of universal experiences can give intelligence to one man of what another suffers or enjoys, that a life has passed through certain general but acute stages of common hopes, and fears, and griefs; that a man has undergone certain demands on his moral being, which, howsoever impermanent in actual duration, are indelible in their aggregate effect upon the imaginative and emotional faculties. Such facts are recognised by all to be as light and darkness to the earth, making day or night, shadow or sunshine, in that

strict enclosure of personality where no stranger enters without sacrilege, where affection dominates ambition, and even the most vital aims of years are suspended, it may be annulled, beside the upspringing or the extinction of some small human flame of private love, or hope, or joy; something which in respect of the world's life is as nothing; something which in respect of the man's life is all in all.

Such inferences are, in the main, all that the memoir of William Morris invites. Upon the brother of Dante Rossetti another obligation rested. The unworthy betrayals of friendship, the mournful conditions of a life which vulgar curiosity had dragged into prominence, the ungenerous judgements of men who forget that

'Who knows but partly can but judge in part,'

demanded, in his opinion, a fuller and more personal exposition, and have entailed upon criticism a correlatively closer attention to the more intimate aspects of the facts he has supplied.

So far as events are concerned, the lives of Rossetti and Morris, as well as that of Morris's co-disciple Burne-Jones, were exceptionally bare of incident. Each of the three great artists, whose especial gift it was to resuscitate tradition, belonged by birth to the class-embracing the lesser professional and the upper commercial-where the sense of tradition is at its lowest, effaced by the necessities of breadwinning, and by that enhanced appreciation of the value of money as the arbiter of human destiny induced by the daily labour of earning it.

6

Italian by race, Rossetti was born in London in 1828. Five years later Edward Burne-Jones, Welsh by origin, was born in Birmingham; William Morris, a year after, at Walthamstow. Morris alone of the three-the fact should not be forgotten passed a childhood in touch with the earth he knew and loved so well. At the age when Rossetti, who 'meant to be a painter,' drew his knowledge of beast, and plant, and tree from the railinged vegetation of Regent's Park, and the caged menagerie of the Zoological Gardens, studied architecture in the Ionic and Corinthian pilasters of St. John's Wood, attended classes in Portland Place and King's College, books, with an occasional circus performance or theatre-going, his main amusement; at the age when little Burne-Jones, reared in the squalid ugliness of a manufacturing town, immersed himself in classic literature among keen-witted classmates at King Edward's School;

Morris was riding half Essex over in search of old churches,' botanising, shooting, fishing, growing up in free open-air companionship with bird, and beast, and flower, retracing in the play-time of Marlborough days the life of dead centuries in Roman remains and medieval buildings. And the healthful memories of nature's freshest sensations, memories for whose absence no aftermath of life, however rich, can compensate, abode with him to the end. His naturelove was no love of the town-born denizen to whom plain, field, and river, however dear as the Eden of his desires, still bear an alien aspect, but of the country-bred, to whom in farthest exile they remain the homeland of his nativity. Nor is it difficult to trace in Morris's treatment of floral arabesque the under-influence of that lifelong and innate knowledge of the heart concerning flower, and leaf, and stem, which gives an indefinable attraction to his designs even perceptible to those whose technical appreciation of their excellence of form is inadequate. They were the work of a man who in a whole garden of blossoms could distinguish each separate flower-face. The garden is nearly over now.

except that there are a good many roses, and amongst them 'a pale sweet-briar blossom among the scarlet hips, that I am sure I never saw before' is a sentence Rossetti could never have written, and betrays a familiarity, a personality of knowledge which the exquisite fragility of Burne-Jones's harebells, the etherialisation of his columbines, lacks.

But howsoever severed in boyhood by disparities of external circumstance, in the next stage of manhood those converging tendencies that overrule outward conditions and human intention narrowed towards their meeting-point. Ten years before the year (1852) when Morris and BurneJones matriculated on the same day at Exeter College, Rossetti, Morris's senior by six years, Burne-Jones's by five, had entered upon the formal study of art. By 1848 he had passed from Carey's drawing school and the study of the antique at the Royal Academy to become a pupil of Madox Brown, and found in Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt, both then exhibiting painters, those congenial spirits from whose union sprang the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1849 Mary Virgin' had been publicly applauded, and in 1850 'Ecce Ancilla Domini' had, with other works of the Brotherhood, excited a storm of adverse criticism. And henceforth on Rossetti fell the lot of a leader among revolutionists, while, both destined for Holy Orders, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones were inaugurating their lifelong friendship, each

finding in the other not only kindred literary enthusiasms, but likewise that firmer cement of friendship, the complemental 'spirit' of those sharply contrasting qualities native to each and accentuated in both by the divergent influences of childhood and boyhood.

6

Some years, however, were still to elapse before the two undergraduates were drawn within the circle of Rossetti's personal influence. Through his works, nevertheless, he had become one of the heroes of their Oxford enthusiasms. I was two-and-twenty, and had never met, or ever seen, a painter in my life,' Burne-Jones wrote in after years; 'I knew no one who had ever seen one, or had been in a studio, and of all men who lived on earth, the one I wanted to see was Rossetti.' In 1855 they met. Henceforth in the history of æsthetics the names of BurneJones and Morris are abidingly associated with that of their first master. But while the fellowship in art and in the aims of art involved, as such fellowships are apt to do, a fellowship in life, no three lives could present more obvious contrasts of personality, and as artists there were consequent and perceptible severances. In Rossetti and in Burne-Jones, the one expressing himself in poetry and painting, the other in painting alone, we are conscious throughout that their expression in art is related solely and emphatically to their ideal in art: it is art related to art. In Morris the human, and more than the human, the social, instinct is superadded, and his art assumes another relationship and becomes an art related to man. Thus, while Rossetti and Burne-Jones created, each after his own mould, the ideal of a school, Morris, acting upon an equally spontaneous impulse, infected the world with a principle, sowing the seeds of new tastes broadcast, generating wants and desires among men at large for things fair in semblance and honest in workmanship. Nor, setting the poetry of Morris beside that of Rossetti, is the same distinction lacking. Morris is above all things the teller of a tale, the communicator of that which he knows to those who know it not; his audience is ever present. With Rossetti we scarcely ever lose the impression that his poems embody some strong bias of individual sentiment, some strong vibration of personal emotion, that even in the ballad of a Rose-Mary or a Sister Helen we may read, if not an autobiography of facts, at least in fragmentary sentences an autobiography of sensations. If, indeed, it may be truly said of Burne-Jones that his pictures are the incarnation of