I am not going to give selections from his larger works, so I can only mention here what the large works signify and how he is related to Chaucer through one of them. The most successful, in a popular sense, of all his poems is the "Earthly Paradise," originally published in five volumes, now published in four--and the volumes are very thick. This vast composition is much on the plan of the "Canterbury Tales"; and Morris and Chaucer both followed the same method, and were filled with the same sense of beauty. Both found in the legends of the Middle Ages and in the myths of antiquity, material for their art in the shape of stories; and as these stories had no inter-relation, belonging even to widely different epochs of human civilisation, it was necessary to imagine some general plan according to which all could be brought harmoniously together, like jewels, upon a single tray. This plan of uniting heterogeneous masses of fiction or legends into one artistic circle was known to the East long before it was known in Europe; the great Indian collections of stories, such as the Panchatantra and the Kâth-sarit-sâgara, are perhaps the oldest examples; and the huge Sanskrit epics show something of the same design, afterwards adopted by Arabian and Persian story-tellers. But Chaucer was the first to make the attempt with any success in English literature. His plan was to have the stories told by pilgrims travelling on their way to Canterbury, every man or woman of the company being obliged to tell one or two stories. The plan was so good that it has been followed in our own day; Longfellow's "Tales of a Wayside Inn" are constructed upon precisely the same principle. But Chaucer made a plan so large that he had not the strength nor the time to carry it to completion; Morris, upon a scale nearly as large, brought his work to a happy conclusion with the greatest ease. He makes a company of exiled warriors tell the stories of a foreign court, as results of their experience or knowledge obtained in many different countries. There are twenty-four stories, twelve mediæval or romantic and twelve classical; and each pair of these corresponds with one of the twelve months, the first two stories being told in January, the second two in February, and so forth. The division neatly partitions the great composition into twelve books, with the regular prologues and epilogues added. The English are not apt to trouble themselves to read very long poems these days; but Morris was able actually to revive the mediæval taste for long romances. Tens of thousands of his books were sold, notwithstanding their costliness, and the result was altogether favourable for the new development of romantic feeling, not only in literature, but in art and decoration. One might suppose that such composition was enough to occupy a lifetime, but Morris threw it off quite lightly and set to work upon a variety of poetical undertakings nearly as large. He