London about seven o'clock in the morning, and after leaving his bag at the hotel and slinging his familiar 'haversack' over his arm, we set forth together for breakfast at my mother's house on the south side of the river. Although the morning was bright and warm in the spring sunshine, hardly a soul was visible in the streets; and as we walked round by George Square in order that Morris might despatch a telegram at the Central Post Office, we seemed to be almost the only inhabitants of the city. Morris had on former visits been shown the leading thoroughfares and sights of Glasgow, including the Square which is reckoned the architectural cynosure of the city. His opinion of my native town, which Robert Buchanan with a fine stretch of imagination described in his Exhibition Ode as 'the dark, sea-born city with its throne on a surge-vexed shore,' was not a complimentary one. He had only seen Glasgow under various aspects of wet and dismal weather. This morning, however, the Square, bathed as it was in spring sunshine, with its flower-beds in freshest bloom, and clear of the hubbub of the trams and other week-day traffic, had an air of modest capitoline splendour that seemed to gainsay bravely the sweeping dispraise of its detractors.
Morris glanced at the Palladian edifice of the City Chambers, still looking assertively new, that fronted the Square. The vehemence and rudeness of his expression on first seeing this building a couple of years before had astonished those who were with him, and he again turned his face from it with an unquotable epithet of contempt. Looking round the Square at the Post Office, the Merchants' House, and the far-stretching range of elaborate facades of banks and other commercial offices in St. Vincent Place, his face hardened. 'Renaissance and the devil be damned!' was his comment; and addressing me he added 'Allow me, my friend, to remark, being as this is the Sabbath day, that your respected city, like most of its commercial kind, is, architecturally speaking, woefully bad, and I fear impenitently so. Your young "Scots wha hae" of the Glasgow
