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

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 mediæval 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 "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