Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/36

ÆT. 14] quantities. Within six months the shares were changing hands in the market at eight hundred pounds each. Mr. Morris's holding rose for a while to the value of over two hundred thousand pounds. Three quarters of a million tons of copper ore were yielded by the mine before the gradual exhaustion of the lodes, and the fall in the price of copper, brought its prosperity to a close. It still leads a somewhat struggling existence on the proceeds of the arsenic which, in the high days of the copper-mining industry, was neglected as an unimportant by-product. But its earlier fortunes, and its gradual decline, were not without importance in determining the course of Morris's life.

Some time before his death Mr. Morris had bought a nomination to Marlborough College for his son. The school had been recently founded "in a healthy and central position," to quote the terms of its prospectus, "and conveniently accessible from all parts of England, being only twelve miles from Swindon, which is to be the great point of junction of the chief lines of railway in the kingdom." It was at all events in the centre of one of the most beautiful and romantic parts of England, in a neighbourhood full of history, and still fuller of prehistoric records. A childhood on the skirts of Epping Forest was fitly followed by a boyhood on the edge of Savernake. It is not easy to over-estimate the influence of these surroundings on the development of a sensitive and romantic nature, or their share in fostering that passionate love of earth and her beauty which remained a controlling and sustaining force throughout his life.

Morris was entered at Marlborough College in February, 1848, being then just under fourteen. He remained there till the Christmas of 1851, the last year of Dr. Wilkinson's rather disastrous head-master-