ridge," "Edinboro' Town," etc.
Swinburne has given the _rationale_ of this type of art in his
description of a Bacchus and Ariadne by Lippino Lippi ("Old Masters at
Florence"), "an older legend translated and transformed into mediaeval
shape. More than any others, these painters of the early Florentine
school reproduce in their own art the style of thought and work familiar
to a student of Chaucer and his fellows or pupils. Nymphs have faded
into fairies, and gods subsided into men. A curious realism has grown up
out of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could not
but falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino's
has all the singular charm of the romantic school. . . . The clear form
has gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight . . . but the mediaeval or
romantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. . . . Before
Chaucer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory
of the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, the
whole poem collapsed into romance; but far as these may be removed from
the true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not phantoms."

But of all this group, the one most thoroughly steeped in
mediaevalism--to repeat his own description of himself--was William
Morris. He was the English equivalent of Gautier's _homme moyen age_;
and it was his endeavour, in letters and art, to pick up and continue the
mediaeval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of modern
civilisation. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not attract
him; and as for the eighteenth, it simply did not exist for him.[28] The
ugliness of modern life, with its factories and railroads, its
unpicturesque poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as it
was to Ruskin--his teacher. He loved to imagine the face of England as
it was in the time of Chaucer--his master; to

"Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston smoke, . . .
And dream of London, small and white and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green."

The socialistic Utopia depicted in his "News from Nowhere" (1890) is a
regenerated Middle Age, without feudalism, monarchy, and the mediaeval
Church, but also without densely populated cities, with handicrafts
substituted for manufactures, and with mediaeval architecture, house,
decoration, and costume. None of Morris' books deals with modern life,
but all