of colours--a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch of
blood or fire, like the scarlet of dead men's sins. Yet there is no
reason whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full of
civic dignity, the treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of
a thousand souls. If the old Greeks had had such an institution, we may
be sure that it would have been surmounted by the severe, but graceful,
figure of the god of letter-writing. If the mediaeval Christians had
possessed it, it would have had a niche filled with the golden aureole
of St Rowland of the Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands at all
our street-corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under
one of the most preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that the
miracles of science have not been such an incentive to art and
imagination as were the miracles of religion. If men in the twelfth
century had been told that the lightning had been driven for leagues
underground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing
human beings, and if they had then been told that the people alluded to
this pulverising portent chirpily as 'The Twopenny Tube,' they would
have called down the fire of Heaven on us as a race of half-witted
atheists. Probably they would have been quite right.

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anaesthetic
element in the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the work of a great
reformer: it requires a fine effort of the imagination to see an evil
that surrounds us on every side. The manner in which Morris carried out
his crusade may, considering the circumstances, be called triumphant.
Our carpets began to bloom under our feet like the meadows in spring,
and our hitherto prosaic stools and sofas seemed growing legs and arms
at their own wild will. An element of freedom and rugged dignity came in
with plain and strong ornaments of copper and iron. So delicate and
universal has been the revolution in domestic art that almost every
family in England has had its taste cunningly and treacherously
improved, and if we look back at the early Victorian drawing-rooms it is
only to realise the strange but essential truth that art, or human
decoration, has, nine times out of ten in history, made things uglier
than they were before, from the 'coiffure' of a Papuan savage to the
wall-paper of a British merchant in 1830.

But great and beneficent as was the aesthetic revolution of Morris, there
was