One day Rossetti had invited us all to dinner, and when we went down to the drawing-room there was great exhilaration, Swinburne leading the fun. Morris was, as usual, very serious, and, in discussing some subject of conversation, Swinburne began to chaff and tease him, and finally gave him a vigorous thrust in the stomach, which sent him backwards into a high wardrobe, on the outer corners of which stood Rossetti's two favorite blue and white hawthorn jars, a pair unrivaled in London, for which he had paid several hundred pounds each. The wardrobe yielded and down came the jars. I caught one, and Morris, I believe, the other, as it was falling on his head. Rossetti was naturally angry, and, for the first and only time in my experience of him, lost control of his temper, bursting out on the culprit with a torrent of abuse which cooled the hilarity of the poet instantly, and reduced him to decorum with the promptness of a wet bath. To hear Swinburne read his own poetry was a treat, and this I enjoyed several times at Rossetti's; the terrible sonnets on Napoleon III. after Sedan, amongst the readings, being the most memorable and effective. The influence of Rossetti on Morris and Burne-Jones is unquestionable, and they probably both owed their embarking in an artistic career to the stimulus given by the advent of a purely artistic nature which set a new light in their firmament. The little we have of Morris's painting shows only that he had the gift, but his own appreciation of his work was too modest to encourage him to face the strain of going through the necessary education, made more difficult by his want of early training, even of the imperfect and incorrect kind against which Rossetti had so successfully had to make his way to a correct conception of his art. On the whole, I consider Morris to have been the largest all-round man of the group, not merely on account of the diversity of his faculties, for he had in his composition a measure, greater or less, of most of the gifts which go to make up the intellectual man and artist, but because he had, in addition to those, a largeness and nobility of nature, a magnanimity and generosity, which rarely enter into the character of the artist; and perhaps the reason why his gifts were not more highly developed was that his estimation of them was so modest. His facility in versification led him to diffuseness in his poems, and the modest estimation in which he held his work, when done, was a discouragement to the _limae labor_ so necessary to perfection. He told me that he had written eight hundred lines of one of his tales in one night, but at the same time he regretted that he could not invent a plot, though the exquisite manner in which he carried out the old plots which have been the common property of poets since poetry existed in the form of tales is honor enough.