Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/377

356 I heard from his niece next day that he was wavering, and that a letter from Morris might have a good effect. I asked for one, and received the following:

"'Horrington House, "'April 3.

"'My dear De Morgan,

"'I should be sorry indeed to force Mr. Carlyle's inclinations on the matter in question, but if you are seeing him I think you might point out to him that it is not only artists or students of art that we are appealing to, but thoughtful people in general. For the rest it seems to me not so much a question whether we are to have old buildings or not, as whether they are to be old or sham old: at the lowest I want to make people see that it would surely be better to wait while architecture and the arts in general are in their present experimental condition before doing what can never be undone, and may at least be ruinous to what it intends to preserve.

"'Yours very truly, "'."

"Next day," Mr. De Morgan goes on, "I received from Miss Aitken a letter from Carlyle to the Society, accepting membership. It made special allusion to Wren, and spoke of his City churches as 'marvellous works, the like of which we shall never see again,' or nearly that. Morris had to read this at the first public meeting—you may imagine that he didn't relish it, and one heard it in the way he read it—I fancy he added mentally, 'And a good job too!'"

Morris's prejudice against the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was indeed carried to a pitch that