Rossetti, however, was irresistible to everybody, and especially to Morris, who saw that he was expected to be agreeable to me, and most agreeable he was, though for at least an hour I could still see the shy look in the corner of his eyes. He invited me to join the fishing, which I did. Finding every faculty of Morris’s mind and every nerve in his body occupied with one subject, fishing, I (coached by Rossetti, who warned me not to talk about ‘The Defence of Guenevere’) talked about nothing but the bream, roach, dace, and gudgeon I used to catch as a boy in the Ouse, and the baits that used to tempt the victims to their doom. Not one word passed Morris’s lips, as far as I remember at this distance of time, which had not some relation to fish and baits. He had come from London for a few hours’ fishing, and all the other interests which as soon as he got back to Queen’s Square would be absorbing him were forgotten. Instead of watching my float, I could not help watching his face with an amused interest at its absorbed expression, which after a while he began to notice, and the following little dialogue ensued, which I remember as though it took place yesterday:— “How old were you when you used to fish in the Ouse?” “Oh, all sorts of ages; it was at all sorts of times, you know.” “Well, how young then?” “Say ten or twelve.” “When you got a bite at ten or twelve, did you get as interested, as excited, as I get when I see my float bob?” “No.” The way in which he said, “I thought not,” conveyed a world of disparagement of me as a man who could care to gaze upon a brother angler instead of upon his own float. II. In whatsoever William Morris does or says the hand or the voice of the poet is seen or heard: in his house decorations no less than in his epics, in his illuminated manuscripts no less than in his tapestries, in his philippics against “restoration” no less than in his sage-greens, in his socialism no less than in his samplers. And first a word as to his poetry. Any critic who, having for contemporaries such writers as Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and William Morris, fails to see that he lives in a period of great poets may rest assured that he is a critic born—may rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans he would have joined the author of ‘The Returne from Parnassus’ in despising the unacademic author of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear.’ Among this band of great contemporary poets what is the special position held by him who, having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the epic, has now, by way of recreation, or rather by way of opening a necessary safety-valve to ease his restless energies, invented a system of poetic socialism and expounded it in a brand-new kind of prose fiction?