ou will find the
broadest expression in the pages of Walter Scott; it is curious, as
showing how sometimes one art will lag behind another in a revival, that
the man who wrote the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of 'The
Heart of Midlothian,' for instance, thought himself continually bound to
seem to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothic
architecture; he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it gave him
pleasure, but somehow he had not found out that it was art, having been
taught in many ways that nothing could be art that was not done by a
named man under academical rules." [32]

It is worth while to glance at Morris' culture-history and note the
organic filaments which connect the later with the earlier romanticism.
He had read the Waverley novels as a child, and had even snatched a
fearful joy from Clara Reeve's "Old English Baron." [33] He knew his
Tennyson before he went up to Oxford, but reserved an unqualified
admiration only for such things as "Oriana" and "The Lady of Shalott."
He was greatly excited by the woodcut engraving of Duerer's "Knight, Death
and the Devil" in an English translation of Fouque's "Sintram." [34]
Rossetti was first made known to him by Ruskin's Edinburgh lectures of
1854 and by the illustration to Allingham's "Maids of Elfin Mere," over
which Morris and Burne-Jones "pored continually." Morris devoured
greedily all manner of mediaeval chronicles and romances, French and
English; but he read little in Elizabethan and later authors. He
disliked Milton and Wordsworth, and held Keats to be the foremost of
modern English poets. He took no interest in mythology, or Welsh poetry
or Celtic literature generally, with the exception of the "Morte
Darthur," which, Rossetti assured him, was second only to the Bible. The
Border ballads had been his delight since childhood. An edition of
these; a selection of English mediaeval lyrics; and a "Morte Darthur,"
with a hundred illustrations from designs by Burne-Jones, were among the
unfulfilled purposes of the Kelmscott Press.

Morris' first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," was put
forth in 1858 (reprint in 1875); "a book," says Saintsbury, "almost as
much the herald of the second school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson's
early work was of the first." [35] "Many of the poems," wrote William
Bell Scott, "represent the mediaeval spirit in a new way, not by a
sentimental, nineteenth-century-rev