of them with an imaginary future or an almost equally imaginary
past. This same "News from Nowhere" contains a passage of dialogue in
justification of retrospective romance. "'How is it that though we are
so interested with our life for the most part, yet when people take to
writing poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life,
or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike that
life? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves?' . . . 'It always was
so, and I suppose always will be,' said he, 'however, it may be
explained. It is true that in the nineteenth century, when there was so
little art and so much talk about it, there was a theory that art and
imaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but they
never did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always
took care . . . to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way
or another make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude there
was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the
Pharaohs.'" [29]

The difference between the mediaevalism of Rossetti and of Morris
illustrates, in an interesting way, the varied results produced by the
operation of similar influences on contrasted temperaments. The
comparison which Morris' biographer makes between him and Burne-Jones
holds true as between Morris and Rossetti: "They received or
re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain, in the one case
of a Norman, in the other of a Florentine." Morris was twice a Norman,
in his love for the romancers and Gothic builders of northern France; and
in his enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas. His visits to Italy left him
cold, and he confessed to a strong preference for the art of the North.
"With the later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sympathy. In
spite of its magnificent power and energy, I feel it as an enemy, and
this much more in Italy, where there is such a mass of it, than
elsewhere. Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I long
rather for the heap of gray stones with a gray roof that we call a house
north-away." Rossetti's Italian subtlety and mysticism are replaced in
Morris by an English homeliness--a materialism which is Teutonic and not
Latin or Celtic, and one surface indication of which is the scrupulously
Saxon vocabulary of his poems and prose romances. "His earliest
enthusiasms," said Burne-Jones, "were his latest. The thirtee