ABSTRACT
A choice reading for the long dark of London winter evenings is offered us in this second instalment-or rather third instalment, as the fifth and latest edition of the work is divided-of Mr. William Morris's Earthly Paradise. That in our Victorian epoch of bustle and business overmuch, the popularity in which a fifth edition testifies should have been won by a poem outbidding most Elizabethan poem~ in its claims on the leisure and the patience of its readers, seems a fact not short of astounding. Certainly it is a fact that can scarcely be construed save as proof of some special and sterling excellence which the public has recognized in the work. We had great pleasure in ourselves acknowledging the presence of such excellence, and in attempting to analyze its character, when the first part of the Earthly Paradise was produced a year and a half ago. It now becomes our task to indicate to our readers to what extent and with what modifications such excellence seems to us to have been sustained by Mr. Morris in his new volume.
