He was at the same time nervous and restless.  He was given to talking to himself; his hands were never at peace; “if he read aloud, he punched his own head in the exuberance of his emotions.”  Possibly there was something high-strung even about his play, as when, Mr. Mackail tells us, “he would imitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to a chair and, after a sullen pause, coming down with a soft, heavy flop.”  It seems odd that Mr. John Burns could say of this sensitive and capricious man of genius, as we find him saying in Mr. Compton-Rickett’s book, that “William Morris was a chunk of humanity in the rough; he was a piece of good, strong, unvarnished oak—­nothing of the elm about him.”  But we can forgive Mr. Burns’s imperfect judgment in gratitude for the sentences that follow: 

    There is no side of modern life which he has not touched for good. 
    I am sure he would have endorsed heartily the House and Town
    Planning Act for which I am responsible.

Morris, by the way, would have appreciated Mr. Burns’s reference to him as a fellow-craftsman:  did he not once himself boast of being “a master artisan, if I may claim that dignity”?

The buoyant life of this craftsman-preacher—­whose craftsmanship, indeed, was the chief part of his preaching—­who taught the labourers of his age, both by precept and example, that the difference between success and failure in life was the difference between being artisans of loveliness and poor hackworkers of profitable but hideous things—­has a unique attractiveness in the history of the latter half of the nineteenth century.  He is a figure of whom we cannot be too constantly and vividly reminded.  When I took up Mr. Compton-Rickett’s book I was full of hope that it would reinterpret for a new generation Morris’s evangelistic personality and ideals.  Unfortunately, it contains very little of importance that has not already appeared in Mr. Mackail’s distinguished biography; and the only interpretation of first-rate interest in the book occurs in the bold imaginative prose of Mr. Cunninghame Graham’s introduction.  More than once the author tells us the same things as Mr. Mackail, only in a less life-like way.  For example, where Mr. Mackail says of Morris that “by the time he was seven years old he had read all the Waverley novels, and many of Marryat’s,” Mr. Compton-Rickett vaguely writes:  “He was suckled on Romance, and knew his Scott and Marryat almost before he could lisp their names.”  That is typical of Mr. Compton-Rickett’s method.  Instead of contenting himself with simple and realistic sentences like Mr. Mackail’s, he aims at—­and certainly achieves—­a kind of imitative picturesqueness.  We again see his taste for the high-flown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that “a common bond unites all these men—­Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris.  They differed in much; but, like great mountains lying apart in the base, they converge high up in the air.”  The landscape suggested in these sentences is more topsy-turvy than the imagination likes to dwell upon.  And the criticisms in the book are seldom lightning-flashes of revelation.  For instance: