itherto written. For us, however, his
style is of less importance than the fact that he applied it almost
wholly to the carrying out of that rejuvenescence of romance of which we
have been speaking, and which may be taken, as anybody pleases, either
for a mere alternative to the domestic novel or as a definite revolt
against it. It was speedily taken up by writers mostly still living, and
so not to be dwelt on now.

Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William Morris turned from
verse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught the
fancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but which
seem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if
rightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise and
suggestion. These, seven or eight in number, from _The House of the
Wulfings_ (1889) to _The Sundering Flood_, published after the author's
death in 1898, were actual romances--written in a kind of modernised
fifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents of
the conflict between Romans and "Barbarians," most with the frank
no-time and no-place of Romance itself. They came at an unfortunate
moment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it proper
to be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and when
some at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had left
their first faith in poetry or poetic prose. There was, moreover,
perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisian
condemnation, of the "Wardour Street" dialect. Yet there was no sham in
them: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do with
shams--even his socialism was not that--and they were in reality a
revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance
itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put
a little of the nineteenth century into them. The best--probably the
best of all is _The Well at the World's End_ (1896)--have an
extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by no
means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come. But for
the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not
comprehended or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoying
to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles
given to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is the
appointed reviver of poetry, so is