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320 questioning pursuit of duty not without the courage of hope.

His "pleasure work of books" was still to issue in what he himself regarded as his highest achievement in literature, the epic of "Sigurd the Volsung." But during the year or eighteen months in which it was composed, his principal daily occupation, on what he calls the bread and cheese side of his activity, was the study and practice of dyeing and the cognate arts. This was necessary in order to lay a secure foundation for the production of textiles of all kinds: and it was not till he had mastered its processes that he was able to give his invention and his manual dexterity full scope, and produce what he wished, instead of being restricted to what he could make out of the bad or imperfect material supplied to him by the ordinary channels of commerce. From the very beginnings, the work of the firm had been hampered and often crippled by the difficulty of getting material, either raw or manufactured, which came near Morris's standard. "I remember," he said at the opening of the Manchester Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1882, "when I was first setting up house twenty-three years ago, and two or three other friends of mine were in the same plight, what a rummage there used to be for anything tolerable. On the whole I remember that we had to fall back on turkey-red cotton and dark blue serge." There was now indeed a noticeable improvement in some directions. Industrial art was no longer, as it had been in the fifties, absolutely debased. From centres of education at South Kensington and elsewhere there had been a slow and partial diffusion of knowledge, and ugliness or dishonesty, or both, did not now reign uncontrolled over the whole field of decorative production. Adulteration had been