A bold writer would he be who in the present day should make Shakespeare figure among the Kenilworth festivities as a famous player (after the manner of Scott), or who should (after the manner of Kingsley) give Elizabeth credit for Winter’s device of using the fire-ships before Calais. Even the poet—he who, dealing as he does with essential and elemental qualities only, is not so hampered as the proseman in these matters—is beginning also to feel the tyranny of documents, as we see notably in Swinburne’s ‘Bothwell,’ which consists very largely of documents transfigured into splendid verse. But more than even this: the mere literary form has now to be as true to the time depicted as circumstances will allow. If Scott’s romances have a fault it is that, as he had no command over, and perhaps but little sympathy with, the beautiful old English of which Morris is such a master, his stories lack one important element of dramatic illusion. But it is in the literary form of his story that Morris is especially successful. Where time has dealt most cruelly with our beloved language is in robbing it of that beautiful cadence which fell from our forefathers’ lips as sweetly and as unconsciously as melody falls from the throat of the mavis. One of the many advantages that Morris has reaped from his peculiar line of study is that he can write like this—he, and he alone among living men:— “‘Surely thou goest to thy death.’ He smiled very sweetly, yet proudly, as he said: ‘Yea, the road is long, but the end cometh at last. Friend, many a day have I been dying; for my sister, with whom I have played and been merry in the autumntide about the edges of the stubble-fields; and we gathered the nuts and bramble-berries there, and started thence the missel-thrush, and wondered at his voice and thought him big; and the sparrow-hawk wheeled and turned over the hedges, and the weasel ran across the path, and the sound of the sheep-bells came to us from the downs as we sat happy on the grass; and she is dead and gone from the earth, for she pined from famine after the years of the great sickness; and my brother was slain in the French wars, and none thanked him for dying save he that stripped him of his gear; and my unwedded wife with whom I dwelt in love after I had taken the tonsure, and all men said she was good and fair, and true she was and lovely; she also is dead and gone from the earth; and why should I abide save for the deeds of the flesh which must be done? Truly, friend, this is but an old tale that men must die; and I will tell thee another, to wit, that they live: and I live now and shall live. Tell me then what shall befall.” Note the music of the cadence here—a music that plays about the heart more sweetly than any verse, save the very highest. And here we touch upon an extremely interesting subject.