any rate, platform oratory, as is witnessed by the fact of the great vogue of eloquent preachers, and the huge crowds that assemble to listen to famous political speakers, irrespective of creed or party, is apparently as attractive to our presentday 'unsophisticated' fellow citizens as it was alike to the cultured and to the uncultured populace of Periclean Athens.
For myself, whom my readers may by now suspect of grudging any detraction whatever from Morris' excellences, I may as well make a clean breast of it, and confess that I am by no means persuaded that the gift of oratory or of eloquent and ornate writing is a spurious one, or is in any way allied to weakness of conviction or insincerity of mind. Fools and knaves are by no means always eloquent or even loquacious. Nor have I found—and this with me is a test example—that the more eloquent of our Socialist propagandists, or for that matter of politicians and preachers generally, are less reliable in thought, or in word, or in deed than their less eloquent brothers. Nor does history testify against the gift of 'tongues.' Many of the noblest teachers and reformers, heroes and masters, were men and women of powerful and attractive eloquence. Pericles, St. Paul, St. Dominic, Savonarola, Luther, and notable publicists in recent days, such as Ernest Jones, John Bright, Wendell Phillips, Colonel Ingersoll, Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, Spurgeon, Jean Jaurès, all of them were remarkable orators; and no one would, I think, say that they were insincere or unreliable in character or speech. And I confess further that for myself, not only good oratory on the platform but eloquence and occasionally sheer rhetoric in writing have much charm. I am among those who can take whole-hearted delight in some of the more rhetorical passages of poetry which can be found, for example, in Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Victor Hugo. I shall even avow that where, rarely though it be, Morris himself seems to verge on the borderline of rhetoric, as in some parts of his 'John Ball' and his 'Aims of Art,' and perhaps,
