think he took less interest in
Italian politics than in English. . . . The truth is, he cared for
nothing but individual and personal matters; chiefly of course in
relation to art and literature."

[24] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature," by W. J. Courthope,
London, 1885, p. 230.

[25] "Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a
muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune,
turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was
his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only
ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2)
'Christabel'; (3) 'Kubla Khan'; and (4) the poem called 'Love'"
(Mackail's "Life of Morris," vol. ii., p. 310).

[26] "The Life of William Morris," by W. J. Mackail, London, 1899, vol.
ii., p. 171.

[27] For the Chaucerian manipulation of classical subjects by
Pre-Raphaelite artists see "Edward Burne-Jones," by Malcolm Bell, London,
1899.

[28] "The slough of despond which we call the eighteenth century" ("Hopes
and Fears for Art," p. 211). "The English language, which under the
hands of sycophantic verse-makers had been reduced to a miserable
jargon . . . flowed clear, pure, and simple along with the music of Blake
and Coleridge. Take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves,
as a type of the change that has happened in literature since the time of
George II." (_ibid._, p. 82).

[29] Page 113.

[30] "Sir Edward Burne-Jones told me that Morris would have liked the
faces in his pictures less highly finished, and less charged with the
concentrated meaning or emotion of the painting . . . and he thought that
the dramatic and emotional interest of a picture ought to be diffused
throughout it as equally as possible. Such, too, was his own practice in
the cognate art of poetry; and this is one reason why his poetry affords
so few memorable single lines, and lends itself so little to quotation"
(Mackail's "Life of William Morris," vol. ii., p. 272).

[31] "Hopes and Fears for Art," p. 79.

[32] _Ibid._, p. 83.

[33] See vol. i., pp. 241-43.

[34] _Vide supra_, p. 153.

[35] "A Short History of English Literature," p. 783.

[36] "Recollections of Rossetti," vol. ii., p. 42.

[37] "King Arthur's Tomb."

[38] 0ne of these, "The Haystack in the Floods," has a tragic power
unexcelled by any later work of Morris.

[39] Saintsbury, p. 785.

[40] "King Arthur's