Or fancy a democracy educated up, or rather down, to the level of Oxford and Cambridge, as some even of our Socialist friends would have it!'
He was reminded that John Ruskin had a year or two previously contested the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University as a Tory Unionist, but had been badly defeated. 'But he called himself also the "reddest of red Communists,"' Morris observed, 'and he deserved to be defeated for his pranks. But I don't suppose he was defeated because he called himself a red-hot Communist, or even because he held heterodox views about Capital and Labour. Your University folk knew and cared precious little about his views on these questions, or if they did, I fancy they took those views more seriously than did the stock-jobbers. He was defeated, I suspect, simply because he represented to the generality of the intellectuals what they particularly affect to esteem—namely Literature and Art—but which they really don't. Literature and Art are rebellious jades. They preferred an uninformed political reactionary because, as I have said, they sniff revolutionary trouble ahead, and they want to set up as stiff a political guard as they can for the protection of their class privileges.'
The conversation turned for a bit on his translation of the Odyssey, and he discussed with MacLaren certain points in Greek idiom and grammar. Something was said about a recent attack on Morris by W.E. Henley in one of the magazines, but Morris dismissed the topic with a contemptuous rap at 'Grub Street garbage.'
After lunch I proposed to Morris that we should start an hour or so earlier than need be for the afternoon meeting, so as to have time for a look at the Cathedral. This he agreed to, and our companions having to leave us for engagements of their own, he and I set forth together. I took him up the old Saltmarket Street (famous in 'Rob Roy'), where he halted every now and then to note some detail in the now old and shabby relics of the mansions where once Bailie Nicol Jarvie and the prosperous merchants of the city
