tion of devices for cramming life with luxuries and excitements, that he avowed with the utmost sincerity his preference for the humblest sort of cottage life to that of the millionaire splendour of Park Lane or of the most desirable mansions of Villadom. Referring to his visit, in 1884, to Edward Carpenter's little farm at Millthorpe, he wrote: 'I went to Chesterfield and saw Edward Carpenter on Monday, and found him sensible and sympathetic at the same time. I listened with longing heart to his account of his patch of ground, seven acres: He says that he and his fellow can almost live on it: they grow their own wheat and send flowers and fruit to Chesterfield and Sheffield markets: all sounds very agreeable to me. It seems to me that a very real way to enjoy life is to accept all its necessary ordinary details and turn them into pleasures by taking interest in them: whereas modern civilisation huddles them out of the way, has them done in a venal and slovenly manner till they become real drudgery which people can't help trying to avoid. Whiles I think, as a vision, of a decent community as a refuge from our mean squabbles and corrupt society; but I am too old now, even if it were not dastardly to desert.'
Nor was his repulsion from luxury, extravagance, and superfluity of material wealth, and his longing for downrightly simple and even arduous conditions of life a merely occasional or passing frame of mind. Again and again in his discourses on Art and Labour does he affirm his belief that the farther we go from the cottage and the nearer to the palace, the farther we banish ourselves from the sweetest and noblest joys of life. 'Art was not born in the palace, rather she fell sick there,' he said in one of his earliest addresses, and unceasingly in his Art lectures he appealed against the whole plutocratic conception of life. Here are a few sentences culled at random from his lectures in which he puts his plea for simplicity of life into almost axiomatic phrase:
'That which alone can produce popular art among
