than conferring one, the natives will hardly think of counting what they receive or of disputing as to the amount due.'
Such are a few snatches from his address on the occasion referred to. Readers of his art lectures and his political addresses will recall many passages attuned on a kindred personal note. There is, for example, the striking personal apologia in his lecture on 'Art and the Beauty of the Earth.'
'Look you, as I sit at my work at home, which is at Hammersmith close to the river, I often hear go past the window some of the ruffianism of which a good deal has been said in the papers of late, and has been said before at recurring periods. As I hear the yells and shrieks and all the degradation cast on the glorious tongue of Shakespeare and Milton, and I see the brutal, reckless faces and figures go past me, it rouses in me recklessness and brutality also, and fierce wrath takes possession of me, till I remember, as I hope I mostly do, that it was my good luck only of being born respectable and rich that has put me on this side of the window amid delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the other side in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor shops, and the foul and degraded lodgings. What words can say what it all means?'
What, I have asked myself, is there in those expressions that mark them in my mind as so distinctive of Morris? I think I have found the answer. It is, I think, because of the absence in them of any air of oracularity, any aloofness of mind, or assumption of superior wisdom or virtue, any speaking down to his hearers as though they were on an inferior human or intellectual level. Always he had a disposition to allude to his own comrades in his remarks, to speak as one of them, and to make them and himself friends with the audience. In other words it is, I think, because they betoken in Morris an innate predisposition to regard himself as one of the general community, as part of the common fellowship of those around him, a fellow man, a fellow citizen, a fellow dweller on earth, not only with
