ABSTRACT
Swinburne and Morris were always on good terms, though the passage given below may have led Swinburne to note in his ‘Changes of Aspect’ (as Cecil Y.Lang truly remarks, ‘the work of a disgruntled, old man’) that ‘Morris could hardly swim a stroke without support from Chaucer’—hardly a fair statement. Indeed The Earthly Paradise is partly inspired by a variety of literary sources, not particularly by Chaucer.
