A little later, under the dominating and somewhat overbearing persuasions of Rossetti, he tried his hand at painting, but never succeeded well in drawing the human face and figure.  The figure designs for his stained glass, tapestries, etc., were usually made by Burne-Jones, Morris furnishing floriated patterns and the like.  In 1861 was formed the firm of Morris & Company, which revolutionised English household decoration.  Rossetti and Burne-Jones were among the partners in this concern, which undertook to supply the public with high art work in wall painting, paper hangings, embroidery, carpets, tapestries, printed cottons, stamped leather, carved furniture, tiles, metals, jewelry, etc.  In particular, Morris revived the mediaeval arts of glass-staining, illumination, or miniature painting, and tapestry-weaving with the high-warp loom.  Though he chose to describe himself as a “dreamer of dreams born out of my due time,” and “the idle singer of an empty day,” he was a tireless practical workman of astonishing cleverness and versatility.  He taught himself to dye and weave.  When, in the last decade of the century, he set up the famous Kelmscott Press, devoted to artistic printing and book-making, he studied the processes of type-casting and paper manufacture, and actually made a number of sheets of paper with his own hands.  It was his favourite idea that the division of labour in modern manufactures had degraded the workman by making him a mere machine; that the divorce between the art of the designer and the art of the handicraftsman was fatal to both.  To him the Middle Ages meant, not the ages of faith, or of chivalry, or of bold and free adventure, but of popular art—­of “The Lesser Arts”; when every artisan was an artist of the beautiful and took pleasure in the thing which his hand shaped; when not only the cathedral and the castle, but the townsman’s dwelling-house and the labourer’s cottage was a thing of beauty.  He believed that in those times there was, as there should be again, an art by the people and for the people.  It was the democratic and not the aristocratic elements of mediaeval life that he praised.  “From the first dawn of history till quite modern times, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its purpose; all men shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as people call it, in those days; that and not robber-barons and inaccessible kings with their hierarchy of serving-nobles and other such rubbish.” [31] One more passage will serve to set in sharp contrast the romanticism of Scott and the romanticism of Ruskin and Morris.  “With that literature in which romance, that is to say humanity, was re-born, there sprang up also a feeling for the romance of external nature, which is surely strong in us now, joined with a longing to know something real of the lives of those who have gone before us; of these feelings united you will find the broadest expression in the pages of Walter Scott; it is curious, as showing how