MOBBIS
MOBSE
MORRIS, William, poet and artist. B.
Mar. 24, 1834. Ed. private school, Marl-
borough, and Oxford (Exeter College).
Morris developed in his youth a great
love of nature and of the artistic aspects
of the Middle Ages, and the friendship of
Burne-Jones at Oxford confirmed this.
He read a good deal of theology and
ecclesiastical history, and was at one time
expected to join the Church of Borne.
He devoted his fortune to founding a
monastery," in which he and his friends should form a "Brotherhood" for the production of religious art. He had been articled to an architect, but Bossetti turned his thoughts to painting and literature. In 1862 he ceased to paint, and confined himself to producing beautiful books and to the reform of house-decoration. For the latter work he and other members of his Brotherhood established a firm of decorators, and did much to raise the appalling level of taste of the time. His Life and Death of Jason (1867) and Earthly Paradise (1868-70) put him among the distinguished poets of his time, and they also mark his transition to Bationalism, which is rather obscure. From 1876 onward he took a fervent interest in social questions, and in 1883 he joined the Socialists. W. Allingham (Diary, 1907, p. 316), who was a friend of Morris, shows that by this time he had quite ceased to take an interest in theology. " It s so unimportant, it seems to me," he said to Allingham. From this nonchalant attitude he passed to Atheism, and surviving friends of his tell how he used to declaim with great zest a certain scornfully anti-Chris tian couplet of Swinburne s, which is unpublished. For the Socialists he wrote his fine Dream of John Ball (1888), Neius from Nowhere (1891), and other works. In his later years he withdrew into purely artistic and literary work. See* Life of W. Morris, by J. W. Mackail (1899). D. Oct. 3, 1896.
MORRISON, George Ernest, M.D., C.M., Australian writer. B. Feb. 4, 1862.
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Ed. Melbourne and Edinburgh Universities.
In 1882-83 he crossed Australia on foot
from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Melbourne,
and in the following year travelled from
Shanghai to Bangoon. He became the
Pekin correspondent of the Times, and
made other remarkable journeys in Asia.
He covered the whole of China, and was
Political Adviser to the President of the
Chinese Bepublic. Dr. Morrison had the
Chinese decoration of the Order of the
Excellent Crop (first class). In his Aus
tralian in China (1895) he shows personal
regard for the missionaries, but reveals the
utter futility and (in places) hypocrisy of
their work. He estimates that they con
vert " nine-tenths of a Chinaman per
worker per annum " (p. 5). He is very
disdainful of the Christian effort. D. May
30, 1920.
MORSE, Professor Edward Sylvester,
A.M., Ph.D., American zoologist and art expert. B. June 18, 1838. Ed. Harvard. He was professor of comparative anatomy and zoology at Bowdoin College from 1871 to 1874, lecturer at Harvard in 1872-73, and professor at the Tokyo Imperial University from 1877 to 1880. On his return to America in 1880 he became Director of the Peabody Museum at Salem, and he has been Keeper of Japanese pottery at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts since 1892. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of a score of foreign societies ; and he was at one time Presi dent of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1886) and of the American Association of Museums. Pro fessor Morse has done very good work in zoology as well as in the fine arts, and has written on zoology as well as on Japan and China. He has the order of the Bising Sun (1898). In an article in Knoiuledge (Oct. 1, 1888, p. 281) Proctor quotes him as saying : " I have not yet seen anything in the discoveries of science which would in the slightest degree support or strengthen a belief in immortality." 536
