and adorning of stories in prose and verse.  Both of these kinds of art were practised by Morris throughout his life.  The former was his principal occupation; he made his living by it, and built up in it a business which alone made him famous, and which has had a great influence towards bringing more beauty into daily domestic life in England and in other countries also.  His profession was thus that of a manufacturer, designer, and decorator.  When he had to describe himself by a single word, he called himself a designer.  But it is the latter branch of his art which principally concerns us now, the art of a maker and adorner of stories.  He became famous in this kind of art also, both in prose and verse, as a romance-writer and a poet.  But he spoke of it as play rather than work, and although he spent much time and great pains on it, he regarded it as relaxation from the harder and more constant work of his life, which was carrying on the business of designing, painting, weaving, dyeing, printing and other occupations of that kind.  In later life he also gave much of his time to political and social work, with the object of bringing back mankind into a path from which they had strayed since the end of the Middle Ages, and creating a state of society in which art, by the people and for the people, a joy to the maker and the user, might be naturally, easily, and universally produced.

Even as a boy Morris had been noted for his love of reading and inventing tales; but he did not begin to write any until he had been for a couple of years at Oxford.  His earliest poems and his earliest written prose tales belong to the same year, 1855, in which he determined to make art his profession.  The first of either that he published appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which was started and managed by him and his friends in 1856.  In 1858, after he had left Oxford, he brought out a volume of poems called, after the title of the first poem in the book, “The Defence of Guenevere.”  Soon afterwards he founded, with some of his old Oxford friends and others whom he had made in London, among whom Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the leading spirit, the firm of Morris and Company, manufacturers and decorators.  His business, in which he was the principal and finally the sole partner, took up the main part of his time.  He had also married, and built himself a beautiful small house in Kent, the decoration of which went busily on for several years.  Among all these other occupations he almost gave up writing stories, but never ceased reading and thinking about them.  In 1865 he came back to live in London, where, being close to his work, he had more leisure for other things; and between 1865 and 1870 he wrote between thirty and forty tales in verse, containing not less than seventy or eighty thousand lines in all.  The longest of these tales, “The Life and Death of Jason,” appeared in 1867.  It is the old Greek story of the ship Argo and the voyage in quest of the Golden Fleece.  Twenty-five other tales are included in “The Earthly Paradise,” published in three parts between 1868 and 1870.