ABSTRACT
All who wish to take a hopeful view of the possibilities and future of English art will hail the publication of Mr. Morris's little volume of Lectures as in itself the most hopeful symptom which has shown itself for many years. The poet of the Earthly Paradise has been an employer of labour and a seller of divers articles of manufacture quite long enough for him to speak with the authority ofexperience, ifexperience had unhappily impelled him towards Carlylesque generalisations about the folly and roguery of the world beneath him. But Mr. Morris does not stand aloof in finely descriptive indignation, from the common herd of makers and sellers. Intimacy with the manifold shortcomings of both classes has produced an uncommonly keen and circumstantial sympathy with their difficulties; but the sympathetic sense of difficulty stops short of despair, even when conjoined with the personal discouragements of the artist.
