menting the lecturer most gallantly on her address, expressed his great disappointment that she had not put 'more vigorous action into it.' 'I always like,' exclaimed he, 'to see orators, especially when they are young and full of life like our lecturer, throw their arms well about,' and in order to illustrate his idea, he swung his own arm, brandishing the ear-trumpet in a great sweep round him, so that both my wife and Morris had to throw themselves hastily back to avoid being struck by the weapon.
The subject of my wife's lecture was 'The Dearth of Joy,' and though I knew the lecture was one which Morris was likely to approve, I had a moment's misgiving over one of the passages in it. In the course of her remarks she alluded to certain signs of a growing moral and intellectual enfeeblement in literature and art, and instanced in contrast with the sorrows of the workers the exaggeration of merely aesthetic griefs and pains on the part of some of our modern poets and artists, mentioning Rossetti as an example. This allusion was not, I knew, prompted in any way by the circumstances of the meeting, as I had heard her make the same reference when delivering the lecture elsewhere. Knowing, however, as I did, Morris' sensitiveness about anything that seemed in the nature of disparagement of the Pre-Raphaelites, and remembering the consequences of an unfortunate remark of my own about Burne-Jones, of which I have spoken in a previous chapter, I felt a bit concerned lest Morris should take umbrage at her stricture on Rossetti.
My apprehension, however, proved a false alarm. So far from dissenting from her observation, Morris in his few concluding remarks expressed his entire accordance with her. 'I quite agree with the lecturer,' he said. 'We have surely enough very real and very terrible woes in modern life to evoke our sympathy and lamentation, without make-believing any fanciful ones. Those I am sure who have themselves experienced, or who have any knowledge whatever of such suffering as that endured by the poor miners
