If the Rossetti family are deeply connected with Bloomsbury streets and squares,--William Morris, the poet of _The Earthly Paradise_, the Socialist, designer, prophet of the House Beautiful, is hardly less so. It was in unromantic Bloomsbury that his ideas of beauty were mainly nourished; Oxford Street, Upton, and Kelmscott came later. Bloomsbury, whose drawing and painting schools are immortalised in Thackeray's novels (_vide_ "Gandish's," in _The Newcomes_,), has always been more or less a focus of art teaching. Bohemian in old days, it is mildly Bohemian still, as any one who frequents the art-schools of the neighbourhood will testify. When Morris first left Oxford, in 1856, he and Burne-Jones took rooms together in Upper Gordon Street, Bloomsbury, as being a convenient locality for the study of art. Here they fell in with other kindred spirits, such as Holman Hunt and Rossetti. "Topsy" (Morris) "and I lived together," Burne Jones wrote in 1856, "in the quaintest room in all London, hung with brasses of old knights and drawings of Albert Dürer." In the following year (1857) they removed to 17 Red Lion Square, a house already consecrated to the early pioneers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: "It was a first-floor set of three rooms; the large room in front looked north, and its window had been heightened up to the ceiling to adapt it for use as a studio: behind it was a bedroom, and behind that another small bedroom or powdering closet. Till the spring of 1859 this was their London residence and working place, and it is round Red Lion Square that much of the mythology of Morris's earlier life clusters. From the incidents which occurred or were invented there, a sort of Book of the Hundred Merry Tales gradually was formed, of which Morris was the central figure."--(_Life of W. Morris, by J. W. Mackail._) "A great many of these stories are connected with the maid of the house, who became famous under the name of 'Red Lion Mary.' She was very plain, but a person of great character and unfailing good humour.... One of the tales told of her shows her imperturbable good nature. Rossetti one day, on her entering the room, strode up to her, and in deep resonant tones, with fearful meaning in his voice, declaimed the lines: "'Shall the hide of a fierce lion Be stretched on a couch of wood For a daughter's foot to lie on, Stained with a father's blood?' "Whereupon the girl, quite unawed by the horrible proposition, replied with baffling complacency, 'It shall if you like, sir'!"