of the two great warring impulses advanced in the foregoing extract from the Introduction to ‘Aylwin.’ Perhaps the difference between the temper of the Elizabethan period and the temper of the Chaucerian on the one hand, and Augustanism on the other, will be better understood by a brief reference to the humour of the respective periods.” Then come luminous remarks upon his theory of absolute and relative humour, which I shall deal with in relation to that type of absolute humour, his own Mrs. Gudgeon in ‘Aylwin.’ I will now quote a passage from an article in the ‘Quarterly Review’ on William Morris by one of Morris’s intimate friends:— “The decorative renascence in England is but an expression of the spirit of the pre-Raphaelite movement—a movement which has been defined by the most eminent of living critics as the renascence of the ‘spirit of wonder’ in poetry and art. So defined, it falls into proper relationship with the continuous development of English literature, and of the romantic movement, during the last century and a half, and is no longer to be considered an isolated phenomenon called into being by an erratic genius. The English Romantic school, from its first inception with Chatterton, Macpherson, and the publication of the Percy ballads, does not, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has finely pointed out, aim merely at the revival of natural language; it seeks rather to reach through art and the forgotten world of old romance, that world of wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty of which poets gain glimpses through magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” In an essay on Rossetti, Mr. Watts-Dunton says:— “It was by inevitable instinct that Rossetti turned to that mysterious side of nature and man’s life which to other painters of his time had been a mere fancy-land, to be visited, if at all, on the wings of sport. It is not only in such masterpieces of his maturity as Dante’s Dream, La Pia, etc., but in such early designs as How they Met Themselves, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Cassandra, etc., that Rossetti shows how important a figure he is in the history of modern art, if modern art claims to be anything more than a mechanical imitation of the facts of nature.