new style was more convenient, and the question of beauty never entered their minds at all. They remorselessly pulled down, or patched meanly and sordidly, the old work. And thus he began to feel that modern art was an essentially artificial thing, a luxury existing for a few leisurely people, and no longer based on a deep universal instinct. He thought that art was wounded to death by competition and hurry and vulgarity and materialism, and that it must die down altogether before a sweet natural product could arise from the stump. Then, too, Morris was not an individualist; he cared, one may think, about things more than people. A friend of his once complained that, if he were to die, Morris would no doubt grieve for him and even miss him, but that it would make no gap in his life, nor interrupt his energy of work. He cared for movements, for classes, for groups of men, more than he cared for persons. And thus the idea came to him, in a mournful year of reflection, that it was not only a mistake, but of the nature of sin, to isolate himself in a little Paradise of art of his own making, and to allow the great noisy, ugly, bewildered world to go on its way. It was a noble grief. The thought of the bare, uncheered, hopeless lives of the poor came to weigh on him like an obsession, and he began to turn over in his mind what he could do to unravel the knotted skein. "I am rather in a discouraged mood," he wrote on New Year's Day 1880, "and the whole thing seems almost too tangled to see through and too heavy to move." And again: "I have of late been somewhat melancholy (rather too strong a word, but I don't know another); not so much so as not to enjoy life in a way, but just so much as a man of middle age who has met with rubs (though less than his share of them) may sometimes be allowed to be. When one is just so much subdued one is apt to turn more specially from thinking of one's own affairs to more worthy matters; and my mind is very full of the great change which I hope is slowly coming over the world."