m the next best thing: they hoist the Jolly Roger over
Shakespeare's works.

Their arrogance is busy in vain. Shakespeare shall never be theirs.
He was an English patriot, who would always have refused to bow the
knee to an insolent alien.

This is mere foaming at the mouth--the tawdry violence of a Tory
Thersites. This passage is a measure of the good sense and imagination Mr.
Whibley brings to the study of Shakespeare. It is simply theatrical
Jolly-Rogerism.

XV.--THE PERSONALITY OF MORRIS

One thinks of William Morris as a man who wished to make the world as
beautiful as an illuminated manuscript. He loved the bright colours, the
gold, the little strange insets of landscape, the exquisite craftsmanship
of decoration, in which the genius of the medieval illuminators expressed
itself. His Utopia meant the restoration, not so much of the soul of man,
as of the selected delights of the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages. His
passion for trappings--and what fine trappings!--is admirably suggested by
Mr. Cunninghame Graham in his preface to Mr. Compton-Rickett's _William
Morris: a Study in Personality_. Morris he declares, was in his opinion
"no mystic, but a sort of symbolist set in a medieval frame, and it
appeared to me that all his love of the old times of which he wrote was
chiefly of the setting; of tapestries well wrought; of needlework, rich
colours of stained glass falling upon old monuments, and of fine work not
scamped." To emphasize the preoccupation of Morris with the very
handiwork, rather than with the mystic secrets, of beauty is not
necessarily to diminish his name. He was essentially a man for whom the
visible world existed, and in the manner in which he wore himself out in
his efforts to reshape the visible world he proved himself one of the
great men of his century. His life was, in its own way, devotional ever
since those years in which Burne-Jones, his fellow-undergraduate at
Oxford, wrote to him: "We must enlist you in this Crusade and Holy Warfare
against the age." Like all revolutions, of course, the Morris revolution
was a prophecy rather than an achievement. But, perhaps, a prophecy of
Utopia is itself one of the greatest achievements of which humanity is
capable.

It is odd that one who spilled out his genius for the world of men should
have been so self-sufficing, so little dependent on friendships and
ordinary human relationships as Morris is depicted both in Mr. M