olation of occupation, or class
or faculty--

"Call down the hawk from the air
Let him be hooded, or caged,
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild."

I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster, being a part of abhorred
London, did not interest me, but I thought constantly of Homer and Dante,
and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisia, the great figures of King and
Queen and the lesser figures of Greek and Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I
thought that all art should be a Centaur finding in the popular lore its
back and its strong legs. I got great pleasure too from remembering that
Homer was sung, and from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some
stanza from _The Divine Comedy_, and from Don Quixote's meeting with some
common man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care greatly for
any poet later than Chaucer and though I preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer
I begrudged my own preference. Had not Europe shared one mind and heart,
until both mind and heart began to break into fragments a little before
Shakespeare's birth? Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer
robbed verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation, though
for another generation or so minstrels were to sing his lengthy elaborated
_Troilus and Criseyde_; painting parted from religion in the later
Renaissance that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while,
that it might characterize, where it had once personified, it renounced,
in our own age, all that inherited subject matter which we have named
poetry. Presently I was indeed to number character itself among the
abstractions, encouraged by Congreve's saying that "passions are too
powerful in the fair sex to let humour," or as we say character, "have its
course." Nor have we fared better under the common daylight, for pure
reason has notoriously made but light of practical reason, and has been
made light of in its turn from that morning when Descartes discovered that
he could think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original
thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery
had not separated from handicraft wholly for the world's good, nor to
notice that the distinction of classes had become their isolation. If the
London merchants of our day competed together in writing lyrics they would
not, like the Tudor merchants, dance in the open s