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tween laughter and tears by her witty sallies.

Her excitability was highly wrought upon by her visits to the old countries. Rome kept her awake all the time she was there. She took letters of introduction to the people of note in the places she went to, and has left many interesting accounts of the celebrities she met. Writing to Emerson, after meeting Carlyle in London, she gives a vivid account of this great man, for whom Edgar Allan Poe said she had what he called a "blind reverence." In his critique upon her he accuses her of " unjustifiable Carlyleisms"; and doubtless she had been much influenced both in thought and style by Carlyle; but she had passed through the phase of blind reverence before she met him, for she goes so far even as to allow that she had wearied of his writings.

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"I meant to write on my arrival in London, six weeks ago but in three days I was in such a round of acquaintances that I had hardly time to dress, and none to sleep during all the weeks I was in London. I find myself much in my element in European society. It does not, indeed, come up to my ideal; but so many of the incumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me in America that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty, and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in the water.

"Of the people I saw in London you will wish me to speak first of the Carlyles. Mr. C. came to see me at once, and appointed an evening to be passed at their house.

"Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendour scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse-only harangues.

It is the usual misfortune of such marked men - happily not one invariable or inevitable-that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe. . . . Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness-no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror.

You do not love him perhaps, nor revere; and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith-the Siegfried melting all the old iron in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you, if you senselessly go too near. He seems to me quite isolated-lonely as the desert.

For the higher kinds

of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself; then begins anew.

It is much if one is not only a crow or magpie-Carlyle is only a lion. Some time we may, all in full, be intelligent and humanly fair.

"For a couple of hours he was talking about poetry; and the whole harangue was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind. ...

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She gives a quaint charactertouch of both Carlyle and Emerson, when, in writing to the latter, she tells him of how she had made Carlyle laugh by an anecdote, and says: "Carlyle is worth a thousand

of you for that; he is not ashamed to laugh when he is amused, but goes on in a cordial human fashion."

We have treated Margaret as yet principally as a woman, endeavouring to seize her personality from amid the mass of recollections which her friends have given to the world. These recollections are often contradictory; but Emerson,

who has evidently endeavoured to put down his true impression of her, excuses this by saying that she herself varied from day to day. At one time she would appear to be devoid of some sense or intuition or belief. At the next interview she would seem to have leaped right on and taken up a new position. If her friends found it difficult to form a definite and consistent idea of her when alive, it is hard to expect them to do so when she is among them no longer. But this chameleon-like character of mind which may

often

appear uncertain and unsatisfactory, yet may have been the very quality which justified her arrogance and sense of queenly power. She was conscious of a wide spiritual range of ability to move quickly in that region of spiritual thought and belief in which most people take up a fixed position, and are almost proud of being incapable of

movement.

As a journalist, as a critic, as one of the transcendental thinkers, and as the Countess d'Ossoli, we have yet to consider her.

(To be concluded in the next number.)

CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS.

NEW SERIES.-No. 11.

WILLIAM MORRIS, M.A.

THERE were persons living in London not many days ago, persons of some position, moreover, who believed in the existence of two very distinct individuals of the name of Morris. One of these was the wellknown author of "The Earthly Paradise," a book which every lover of poetry of the present day has read and enjoyed; the other Morris was quite a different being, and the head of a representative firm whose specialty has been the introduction of real art work into the common things of decoration and furniture. In regard to these two Messieurs Morris, it was deemed quite possible to revel in the poetry thrown off by the magical hand of the one, while seated in an easy chair upholstered in the rare brocade of the loom of the other.

It is our duty to dispel this illusion, and, instead of asking the reader, as Ben Jonson of Shakespeare, to "look, not on his picture but his book,” to state that "this figure that thou here seest put" was stamped in a sheet of lead from a photographic film representing William Morris, poet, yet equally well pourtraying William Morris, of the firm of Morris and Company.

The fact is curious enough to be worth noting, that a single individual should have made so distinct a mark in such different walks of life as to be taken to include in himself two separate celebrities, and that in a day when it is difficult to emerge from the vast undistinguished crowd in any single capacity. That there is a slender thread common to the work done by the "dreamer of dreams" and the work done by the practical man of business in the case before us, it might be possible to demonstrate; but the fact is evidently not sufficiently manifest to have disturbed the believers in the twofold and distinct personality.

It

William Morris was born the 24th March 1834, at Walthamstow. cannot be said that he was the heir of any breath of genius, for it

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