Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/193

172 3. Hector's Last Battle. 4. Hector brought Dead to Troy. 5. Helen's Chamber. 6. Achilles' Love-Letter. 7. The Wedding of Polyxena. 8. The last Fight before Troy. 9. The Wooden Horse. 10. The Descent from the Wooden Horse. 11. Helen and Menelaus. 12. Æneas on Shipboard.

The completed scenes run to about 200 lines each in length, and the whole poem, therefore, would have been of about the bulk of a five-act play.

The story of the Trojan War is one which has for all story lovers the greatest and most abiding fascination; and its strange ending, the events that happened after the Iliad, was the part of the story which attracted Morris the most. In itself that part of the story is full of remarkably picturesque and romantic incident, which breaks out even in the dull records of Greek mythographers, Ælian and Philostratus, or in the arguments of the lost epics of the Cycle—the Æthiopiad, the Little Iliad, the Taking of Troy. It was these events which excited the imagination of the Middle Ages most; and it was in the same mediæval and romantic spirit that Morris saw and felt the whole story. He did so by instinct, long before he knew of Caxton's "Historyes of Troye," or of the vast body of mediæval romances that may be traced back to Benoit de Sainte-More and Guido delle Colonne. But when he came to know these he found them just what he meant and what he wanted; and to the last he pleased himself by fancying some thread of real tradition which had filtered down alongside of the