walked with stumbling feet among the stones of the highway, whose trespasses were the accidents rather than the essence of his temperament, who, carrying with him what was little to the grave of the man, has left us a legacy of what was great in the ideals of the artist. 'His morality ' is all sympathy,' Pater has said of Botticelli's works. The saying may be applied both to Rossetti and to that personality which Burne-Jones, perpetuating and spiritualising one aspect of Rossetti's genius, has embodied in his paintings. And the morality that halts at sympathy is in truth incomplete. Yet it is not a small thing, as any close experience of the morality that lacks it evidences. The emotional response of pity to the appeal of things pitiful, of homage to things brave, of veneration for things pure, is not merely a painted flame. Far rather is it the illuminating assurance that at the core of a man's being lie warm human instincts ranged on the side of all that is good, reverent, and generous, instincts rusted, warped, mutilated by disuse. or accident, but still alive to testify that though deeds suffer from the paralysis of will, that which lies closer to the immortal vitality-the spirit-quickens. I sleep, but 'my heart waketh.'

Eight years before his death the friendship, which from 1871 to 1874 had made Morris and Rossetti joint inmates of Kelmscott, had drawn to a natural and inevitable close. Nor is it possible to trace in Morris's personality any lasting effects of that long-continued intimacy. Not even in the phase of first discipleship, when not as a pupil, but as a servant,' he apprenticed himself, a docile votary at an idol's shrine, did Rossetti's influence-apart from art--touch anything beyond the surface nature of his devotee. Morris caught indeed, we may guess, many reflexions of the imaginative emotion of his great master. But reflexions are not dyes, and throughout the untinged undercurrent of Morris's own inveterately individual personality asserted itself. In 1859 -a year before the wedding of Rossetti-Morris, marrying, like his friend Burne-Jones, in the first years of manhood, had early dispossessed himself of those rights of irresponsible freedom which have for their counterpoise accumulative loneliness, and in the period of Morris's life following upon his marriage we are told that the strain of an orderly civic element,' which Mr. Mackail describes as one of the strongest threads in Morris's nature, developed till he became what he would himself have called in later days a typical bourgeois.'

With unimpaired physical strength, untrammeled from boyhood upwards, so far as things material went, by any cares or anxieties concerning the to-morrows of life, the burden of all the practical and inexorable questions entailed by marriage and fatherhood rested lightly upon him; nor can he ever have experienced the depressions and discouragements which weight men of fragile frame for whom the necessities of breadwinning make the pursuit of the ideal in art not only a road of difficulty but an ascent of sacrifice. Such inequalities of fortune and health may have had much to do with the singularly different atmosphere that clings to the works of Morris and Burne-Jones. Yet, that in his exemption from the pressure of outward conditions. and the evils attendant on precarious health, by which Burne-Jones's career was beset, Morris was wholly the gainer, may be doubtful. When the soil is furrowed for the sowing deficiencies of strength and fortune are apt to bring with them, and overpast to leave behind them, for the artist, a more intuitive perception of some aspects of things beautiful; for the man a more unexacting consideration, a more winning patience with the discouragements, failures, unsuccesses and defaultings of others, a special loveableness of nature, indefinable yet easy of recognition, rarely and only by special grace of God acquired under the star of a too constant and too robust prosperity.

'Earth's success, at the purest, with stain of the earthy

Leaves the white worth of truth, where it touches it, less,'

and such disadvantages of good fortune Morris suffered, for, in the main, so far as a life with ideals, human or divine, material or immaterial, can be so accounted, his life was that of a man of success. At his first married home, the Red House, Upton, at his later homes of Kelmscott and in London, a large share of the good things of this world fell to his lot. The companionship of devoted friends, selfchosen associates, was his. His surroundings, and to his temperament surroundings meant much, corresponded to his creed-the doctrine he held more than ever at his 'heart the importance for people of living in beautiful places.' In one of such places he lived: Kelmscott has come to be to me,' he writes in 1882, 'the type of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the homes of harmless, simple people not over-burdened with the intricacies of life; and as others love the race of man through their lovers or their children, so I love the earth through

that small space of it.' of it.' As a poet, fame came to him; his firm flourished; as a craftsman his achievements were unsurpassed by his contemporaries, and recognised as the standard of taste and excellence. As a social reformer he was truly foredoomed to disappointment. But the discouragement induced by his experience of the inner workings of the socialist propaganda, however keenly felt, was tempered by the continuance of his interest in manifold industries, my little patterns and dyeings, and the dear warp and 'weft,' and all those other occupations he had ever set generously on one side for the cause,' but which in themselves filled his days to overflowing. So far, indeed, as his life is made known to us, his joys, griefs, and troubles were those incident to all lives, not the catastrophes of the few among the many, but of the many among the few. And, moreover, foremost among the gifts of fortune, in his open-air, clear-minded, and wholesome manhood he retained that invaluable endowment of childhood, the aptitude for taking pleasure in little things.

His feminine side-for no man can remain so perfectly a child without being partaker in the better part of womanhood-found nourishment in his intense and personal love of the earth in its freshness, and cleanliness, and gladness, and of its children. Every touch betrays his intimacy with them. The blackbirds wake me about 4 o'clock A.M.; as 'for the rooks, they never stop all day long. I saw a leash of 'plovers yesterday squawking away, and making believe they had no nest at hand. The garden is full of bullfinches, 'which are pretty, fat dears, and sing a little, short song very sweetly.' And the flowers no less are loved each for its own special self. 'The snowdrops nearly but not quite gone; a few purple crocuses, but of course not open this sunless day. The daphne very full of blossom. Many 'daffodils nearly out, but only two or three quite. The 'beautiful hepatica, which I used to love so.'. . . Such sentences recur throughout his correspondence, and by that instinctive individualisation of bird and plant may be placed his jealous fondness for his treasure-troves of other things rare and lovely. If you have one of his books,' said a friend, in your hands for a minute, he'll take it away from you, as if you were hurting it.' It is a feeling every child, to whom a toy is more than a toy, has shared with the poet-craftsman. And the childhood in the man, the manhood in the artist, persisted throughout his life.

The attitude of mind and heart from which he viewed

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life was one the shadowy complexities, the troubled and disquieting loveliness of the art of Rossetti, and after another guise the emotional ideals of Burne-Jones, might by force of association obscure, but could not obliterate-'I hope I am not quite unhumble, or want to be the only person in the 'world untroubled; but I have been ever loth to think that there were no people going through life, not without pain, indeed, but with simplicity and free from blinding entangle'ments. Such an one I want to be, and my faith is that it is possible for most men to be no worse.' In his first volume of verses, dedicated to Rossetti, the accent, if more elemental and more dramatic in its alliance to primitive passion, has yet a very close kinship to Rossetti's own genius. In the Earthly Paradise' he stands as a poet brother in arms to the painter of Pygmalion, the Psyche, and the Perseus legends. But in spite of all such twinship of sentiment or theme, we cannot dismiss the intuition that his native sympathies always transgressed the limits of such visions with their bounded fragility of loveliness to expand in regions of colder, clearer, and stronger climes; that his affinity lies with possibly less condensed, but more active passions-the passions of the North-that he moves more freely in scenes where the climax of emotion is not languor, where the extinction of self-consciousness in one single pulsation of the heart or the soul is fraught not with lassitude but energy. While, contrariwise in Rossetti's dual art, in Burne-Jones's painting, fever is for ever at its ebbtide; not passion, but the reaction of passion embodies itself before us; not the seal but the impression on the wax; or perhaps, in some of Rossetti's later pictures and earlier poems, another metaphor may present itself, and we may feel that the image evoked is not of the fire, but of those ashes of dead burnings which should more fitly have been swept from the very threshold of the House of Life.

Nor can any contrast be more complete than that presented by the mode in which the creative genius of Morris and Burne-Jones, acting and reacting either on the other, sought and found its congenial outlet. On Burne-Jones the lot was cast to be both by temperament and choice the artist above all things of conception. To embody his conceptions by the mediums and methods of the outward art of which he was master, limited his ambition. Where other mediums. and other methods were in question, he left to others the execution of his great inventive designs for painted window or woven tapestry. He had no wish himself to translate

his own art into the language of other crafts. But for Morris the joy of invention lay no less in the execution than in the conception. The acquisition of manual mastery in one means of expression was with him but a signal for the acquisition of manual mastery over another. To express what was beautiful in one form sufficed him no whit. He was master dyer, master weaver, master printer, engraver, illuminator, by turns. The restless impulse to action dominates the whole record of the years. Contentment itself, that clog wheel of unrest, seems, except as regarded the composition of verse, to have effected no permanent or perceptible relaxation of energy. The life at Red House was for Morris one of almost complete contentment '-so his biographer speaks of the period when the birth of a first and a second child came to give that new future to hope that parentage confers. But work never ceased, either at Red House, at Kelmscott, or at Hammersmith; rather were all those around him swept into the eddies of his busy brain and hand. And when the times of almost unclouded 'happiness' drifted into that only immutable Eden-the past he still remained, in a fellow-worker's graphic phrase, as a man going at twenty miles an hour.' Indeed, reading his life as the supplement to his works, Mr. Mackail's biography beside Mr. Vallance's 'record,' deeds and the doing of them, stand as his natural and vital element, and feeling takes the subsidiary part of a mere impulsion to action. Involuntarily we image Morris to ourselves companioned with soldier figures of schoolroom heroes-Greatheart fighting the pilgrims' way through giants and lions to the House Beautiful; Sigurd, the great Volsung, who never did lose heart and of naught was adread;' Coeur de Lion as Walter Scott invented him. St. George rises before us as his prototype to whom dragons were a necessary of life, and Robin Hood, patron of all good Socialists

'The good outlawe

Who dy de pore men much good,'

and whose example Morris was fain most cheerfully to follow. But, doer of deeds as he was, under all surface hardihoods lay warm and strong affections. He does not rank among those who stake the whole of happiness upon the doubtful issues of human ties, his life is no story of the hazardous game played by men who risk all for all on one throw of the dice, nor did life's interpretation lie for him in the emotions of heart or soul. Yet disappointments struck