bloweth verily where it listeth to the discomfiture of materialists; nor even that he was born to any transmitted aptitude of brain, or special advantage of early education. He was the eldest son of a family of nine, and his father, an enterprising city man, and as regards views, of the almost extinct type of the Evangelical Tory, died when he was scarcely fourteen years old. The widow and children were left in moderately comfortable circumstances. William went to the school in his native place kept by a Scotchman, Dr. Greig, a school frequented largely by Anglo-Indians, and among his companions were many that afterwards perished in the time of the mutiny.

William Morris was not the pattern boy of the story books, who always attains to a fine worldly position. He was the kind of boy that is fond of " a lark all round." From Walthamstow, when rising fourteen, he passed on to Marlborough, where he remained between three and four years. At this early period he began to take an interest in archæology and the architectural side of art, and would read any book that he could find on these subjects. Many a steeple-hunting expedition was made a different pursuit, it should be noted, from public school steeplechasing; and even memorial brasses had a fascination for the boy. Marlborough he left about the time of the great row and revolt, which will be familiar to old Marlburians, with which, however, he had had no connection. After a year with a private tutor, Dr. Guy, he entered Exeter College, Oxford, beginning residence in the spring of 1852. In respect of the ordinary curriculum of study, he may be said to have idled, though probably during the great frost of 1854 the tremulous acres of ice found him not an idle weight. For classics he did not much care, but was carried away for the time by the medieval and archæological revival. Being then very young, he had also a Puseyite phase. He was in the thick of the days when the Tractarian excitement was nearly over, and the progress party were gathering earnestness, but had not yet made much headway.

His degree he took early, in 1856, and remains still a member of the University. There are curious anomalies in the Oxford Calendar, it being apparently thought worth while to append a note to a man's name, by way of distinction, that he is head master of some scarce known grammar school, or that he gained an English verse prize in the time when he was an “unfeathered, amorphous birdling, still sticky with alien albumen "; but, if he has proved himself a true songster in after life, the fact is presumed to be so well known that no reference to his work is deemed necessary. This compliment is not paid to any ecclesiastical or scholastic success.

Morris's next step was to become articled to George Edmund Street, the well-known architect, then located at Oxford, and shortly afterwards at London. But after about nine months he sickened of the

monotonous task-work that fills up the threshold of the profession, and having the misfortune, as it might have been, to possess a little money of his own, he struck out for himself at this early age.

Whether it was the wholesome influence generated by Arnold of Rugby, that was acting upon young Oxford at this time, it might be difficult to prove, but it is plain that there was a revival of that most evanescent and heavenly of qualities-earnestness. Among a certain section this took, amongst other forms, that of a belief that work being the health and strength of the world, a handicraft was nothing ignoble.

This notion seems to have been floating before Morris's mind even when his tendency was greatest to the idle hilarity of youth; but it led to no practical fruit for some little time. Art and literature, or, to speak more precisely, art in colour work and in literature, were what attracted him when he left Oxford.

Just at the end of his undergraduate days, or when he was about leaving the University, a few choice spirits started the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, a monthly periodical that had no need to be ashamed of itself on the ground of solid excellence, but was one of those heavenly children that for the most part die young. It was edited by a Pembroke man, Mr. Fulford, who is now a private tutor for Army and Navy cadets. To this magazine Dante Rossetti contributed some of his finest poems, including "The Burden of Nineveh" and "The Blessed Damozel." In it were to be found evidences such as the following passage affords of a fine moral vigour, justifying our remarks upon the earnest character of the time: "To do a certain work each man was born. It is the noble duty of each man, in youth, to learn his own peculiar work, and steadily and earnestly to pursue that work, whatever it may be; to pursue it, amidst evil report and good report, for weal and woe, with a zeal enough to satisfy his conscience and his God; this, surely, is to do God's own work upon earth; this, surely, is for man to become a fellow-worker with God, because it is to carry out in its entireness the Perfect Will of the Eternal Mind."

To the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine William Morris also was a contributor, furnishing its pages with a rather remarkable series of short prose romances and a number of poems. The romances have never been reprinted; they are unsigned, but no doubt is expressed that the following are his: "A Dream," "Gertha's Lovers," "Svend and his Brethren," "The Hollow Land," "Golden Wings." They are strongly tinctured with mediævalism, but are none the less full of vivid force, even though now and again we recognise a quality that has been well described as 66 luminous indistinctness."

The poems were nearly all reprinted in their writer's first-published volume; one, however, we may quote here which has not since been

reprinted, and would be difficult to meet with, as the magazine is now

WINTER WEATHER.

There are, as is natural, faults in this early production; as, for instance, it is not easy to see from an artistic point of view why the hound which has once become still begins again to bay at the close of the poem. But in spite of the faults, which are principally those due to the want of that careful finish which practice alone can give, there are unmistakable signs of a power of picturesque and dramatic narration. When Street left Oxford and had been some three months established

in London, William Morris parted from him and began to study painting. He was at the indeterminate, conceited age, and had to work his way out of the Puseyite paths. He was idle and did no very notable work in painting, but developed a turn for the decorative arts, and was gradually drifting towards occupation.

Burne Jones had been a chum of his at Oxford. Dante Rossetti's friendship he had made in London through the mediumship of Wilfrid Healey, a Trinity (Cambridge) man, one of the first of the Competition Wallahs, and an acquaintance of Mr. Vernon Lushington. Mr. Rossetti, who was about five years Mr. Morris's senior, was particularly friendly and kind; and a little circle of what we might almost term ideal realists (for the ideal has its reality) was formed in London. In poetry not only was Rossetti's influence upon William Morris, but also that of both Brownings. Robert Browning with his wondrous dramatic vitality was a wholesome influence; and Mrs. Browning, attracting strongly by such poems as her " Rhyme of Duchess May," was a happy choice for a young poet's worship. Not until years afterwards did William Morris meet either of the Brownings, to be able to acknowledge personally his debt of gratitude to them.

"The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems," which was published in 1859, is a fine addition to the gallery of Arthurian romance and Froissartian memories. Southey's "Morte D'Arthur" may be held partly responsible for awakening this special interest.

In such a volume there was great danger of utter failure. A mediæval revival in poetry would have met with scorn if it had shown either weakness or affectation. The realism, if occasionally violent, is so thorough, and the passion that pervades the whole so intense, that no gap is felt between the old time and the new, so different though they be. The moving realities, the burning colours of life, make us feel at home even among knights and ladies such as we can now nowhere find in the flesh. A sentimental femininity was the danger to fear in such a poetic attempt; a masculine strength, even rude at times, is the actual quality that is found. The figures might have worn garments such as one sees in tapestry, and swords and helmets very blue, and have yet been lifeless puppets, walking draperies; as they are, they are living men and women, though not of our day. We are introduced to the hushed chambers of our ancestors, where gradually rise voices, and forms shape themselves from out the mist, strong and beautiful, and faded colours glow once more, and though we are moving in a dream, we feel the beating of pulses and the burning of hearts. The story-teller's faculty was vividly and dramatically manifest; "The Haystack in the Floods," for instance, may be cited as evidence of directness and force of style.

William Morris found his first waft upon the seas of fame, not in the arts of publishers, but in the spontaneous recognition of appreciative

readers. The Literary Gazette, at the period of the publication of "The Defence of Guenevere," was endeavouring to undo the evil of Jerdan's corruptibility, and its reviews were genuine expressions of critical feeling. Mr. Richard Garnett, of the British Museum, a well-known writer and critic, and among the contributors to the present University Magazine, may be regarded as the first public appreciator of William Morris's verse. Mr. Holmes, now the Queen's Librarian at Windsor Castle, had brought before Mr. Garnett's notice certain poems and prose romances in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which at that time had been dead for a little over a year, and, a poet himself, he had recognised the divinity astir in them. So that when a volume appeared containing, with other longer poems, these anonymous poetic acquaintances, Mr. Garnett was prepared to do justice to it, and reviewed it at length, in the first week of March 1858. A great point in this review was the allusion to the poetic anastasis of the Arthurian cycle of romance, with special reference to the fact that Mr. Morris was without trace of Tennysonian influence, and indeed approached mediæval things in a totally different way. Thus early was Morris compared with Tennyson, the latter being described as writing of the Arthurian period like a modern, the former like a contemporary. "The Laureate," said Mr. Garnett, "is as superior in brilliance of phrase, finish of style, and magic of versification, as he is inferior in dramatic propriety and couleur locale." Mr. Garnett was bold enough to speak of the new writer as "of real original genius," as "a poet whom poets love;" and when we think that it was of an unknown writer, then only twenty-four years of age, that he spoke, we must allow that Mr. Garnett's criticisms proceed from a true instinct and possess a prophetic quality.

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But recognition was slow. It was not until 1860, for instance, that Fraser reviewed the volume, claiming for it the ring of true metal, but alleging that it had passed unrecognised by the critics. It may be interesting to quote what was said of our author before he had become famous :"Mr. Morris is the poet of pre-Raphaelitism. To my friend, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter,' he dedicates his book; and it is not fanciful to say that there is a striking family likeness between the works of the poet and those of the painter. Both artists draw their inspiration from the fount of the Morte d'Arthur. They are thoroughly familiar with the figures of England's chivalry, and with the forms of its heroic life. Instead of Palmerston and Napoleon, Arthur and Lancelot and Galahad are the names in all men's mouths. Guenevere is the standard to which the beauty of all other women is unconsciously referred. We hear of 'bastides' and 'villaynes,' of the 'camaille' and the 'ceinture,' and the 'basnet,' and the 'salade,' more than enough perhaps; but at the same time we see that these are not the mere stage properties in a fantastic mumming, an Eglintoun tournament; that the employment