On the day following our first forgathering at the “Cock,” I was lunching there with another poet—a friend of his—when the waiter, who knew me well, said, “That was a loudish gent a-lunching with you yesterday, sir. I thought once you was a-coming to blows.” Morris had merely been declaiming against the Elizabethan dramatists, especially Cyril Tourneur. He shouted out, “You ought to know better than to claim any merit for such work as ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’”; and wound up with the generalization that “the use of blank verse as a poetic medium ought to be stopped by Act of Parliament for at least two generations.” On another occasion, when Middleton (another fine spirit, who “should have died hereafter”) and I were staying with him at Kelmscott Manor, the passionate emphasis with which he declared that the curse of mankind was civilization, and that Australia ought to have been left to the blacks, New Zealand to the Maoris, and South Africa to the Kaffirs, startled even Middleton, who knew him so well. It was this boisterous energy and infinite enjoyment of life which made it so difficult for people on meeting him for the first time to associate him with the sweet sadness of ‘The Earthly Paradise.’ How could a man of such exuberant animal spirits as Morris—so hearty, so noisy often, and often so humorous—have written those lovely poems, whose only fault was an occasional languor and a lack of humour often commented on when the critic compares him with Chaucer? This subject of Chaucer’s humour and Morris’s lack of it demands, however, a special word even in so brief a notice as this. No man of our time—not even Rossetti—had a finer appreciation of humour than Morris, as is well known to those who heard him read aloud the famous “Rainbow Scene” in ‘Silas Marner’ and certain passages in Charles Dickens’s novels. These readings were as fine as Rossetti’s recitations of ‘Jim Bludso’ and other specimens of Yankee humour. And yet it is a common remark, and one that cannot be gainsaid, that there is no spark of humour in the published poems of either of these two friends. Did it never occur to any critic to ask whether the anomaly was not explicable by some theory of poetic art that they held in common? It is no disparagement to say of Morris that when he began to write poetry the influence of Rossetti’s canons of criticism upon him was enormous, notwithstanding the influence upon him of Browning’s dramatic methods. But while Rossetti’s admiration of Browning was very strong, it was a canon of his criticism that humour was, if not out of place in poetry, a disturbing element of it.