frequent allusions to public affairs, and are sprinkled over with characteristic obiter dicta concerning the personalities of the movement.
My intention at first was only to give a very few extracts here and there from them, but on reading them over afresh I feel that for Socialist readers, at any rate, they possess so much interest—alike because of the intimate light which they throw upon the early circumstances of the movement, and because they display not only Morris' intense earnestness in the work of Socialism, but the zeal and sound common-sense with which he tackled the practical difficulties and controversial problems which beset the movement in its beginning—that I have decided to give the greater portion of them as they stand. Besides simply as letters coming from his pen, they are, as I have said, so characteristic in purpose and form, that I feel sure they will be welcomed by all lovers of Morris.
Morris had the disability, if it be such, of being incapable of assuming any character or views other than his own. He could never have been an actor; he had no histrionic talent. In his speech, his writings, his art, in all things that he did, he was always William Morris. There never perhaps was an artist or writer whose work was invariably so unmistakably his own. From but a sentence or two of any writing of his, or the smallest scrap of one of his designs, his authorship can be discovered at once.
It follows from this that one can hardly, as in the case of many authors, speak of his letter-writing as being different in character from his book-writing. His letters are just as his books, except that in the former he is sometimes more blunt in phrase or whimsical and off-hand in his mood of the moment. Whether, therefore, he is to be classed among those authors who rank as great letter-writers, I am unable to give an opinion. There appear to be as many varieties in what is reckoned first-rate letter-writing as in every other department of literature. Chesterfield, Rutherford, Cowper, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Lord Acton, are all
