the smaller Sagas and executing beautifully written copies of his translations. The illuminated manuscript of the Frithiof Saga, in the possession of Mr. Fairfax Murray, and that of the three Sagas of "Hen Thorir," "The Banded Men," and "Howard the Halt," given by Morris to Mrs. Burne-Jones, both belong to this period. The decoration of the former was never completed, but both are works of remarkable delicacy and beauty.
Even the transfusion of modern sentiment into an ancient story, as had been done with the Arthurian cycle by Tennyson, was a thing that Morris instinctively disliked. But the epic of the North was a thing that lay still nearer his heart; and what he thought a false or inadequate treatment of these great legends roused him into an agony of anger. On the 12th of November, 1873, he wrote from Queen Square to Mr. Forman, who had sent him a copy of his brother's translation of Wagner's libretto for "Die Walküre":
"Many thanks for your letter and the translation of Wagner: I have not had time to read it yet: nor to say the truth am I much interested in anything Wagner does, as his theories on musical matters seem to me as an artist and non-musical man perfectly abhominable: besides I look upon it as nothing short of desecration to bring such a tremendous and world-wide subject under the gaslights of an opera: the most rococo and degraded of all forms of art—the idea of a sandy-haired German tenor tweedledeeing over the unspeakable woes of Sigurd, which even the simplest words are not typical enough to express! Excuse my heat: but I wish to see Wagner uprooted, however clever he may be, and I don't doubt he is: but he is anti-artistic, don't doubt it."
The art of Wagner, indeed, with its lack of reticence, its idealized appeal to the senses, its highly coloured
