book, their colour faded, their fragrance and essence gone. In Morris' company conversation could never sink into banality. His presence inhibited idle and paltry chatter. He was fond of playfulness and humour, but was the deadly enemy of indolence as of mere levity of mind.
The room itself had a spell for the imagination. One could not fail to see that some tutelary genius had its abode in it. Looking around the room, all so charming in the natural simplicity of its furniture—only useful and beautiful things were there, masterpieces of literature and priceless old volumes, Dürer engravings and rare pieces of craftsmanship, and all so kindly lit up in the tranquil candle-light with its ambient shadows—one was conscious of that companionableness in all about one that one feels in a deep forest glade. At times the room seemed a very sanctuary of the Muses or an Abbot's cloister; but its aspects, like its master's moods, were many, and seemed to change responsively. I remember how transfigured it appeared that night—the Saturday night of the week-end visit which I am about to describe. Morris was in a particularly insurgent mood. He had been rating Gladstone and the Liberal Party, which led someone to remark incautiously that the Tories were really more in sympathy with liberty and democracy than the Liberals, citing in support of this view some dictum of Dr. Johnson's.
Morris was Johnsonian in his reply. He asked what liberty or democracy the Tories had ever agitated or fought for? In the country districts the Tories were on their own dunghill, and what sort of liberty or democracy had they given the poor agricultural labourers there? He pursued this vein, recalling facts from history and his own observation, at first in an argumentative way, but gradually firing himself up into a magnificent polemic against the aristocracy, the Church, and eventually the whole property-grabbing class system of modern society. The oppression of Egypt and Ireland, and the police attack in Trafalgar Square, he tossed as flaming faggots into his indictment.
