Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/38

ÆT. 15] lived a rather solitary life; and he left Marlborough with little regret, and retained little affection for it in later years. But his physical and moral strength, both unusually great, saved him from serious bullying, and his school life was not unhappy. The self-sufficingness which always remained one of his most striking characteristics kept him from being either lonely or discontented. He never played either cricket or football. The weekly whole holiday of the summer half was spent by him in long rambles through Savernake Forest and over the Downs, sometimes in company with other boys of congenial tastes, but if not, quite happy to be alone. The pre-Celtic long barrows on the ridges above Pewsey Vale, the round barrows of which Silbury Hill is the most imposing example, the stone circles of Avebury, the Roman villas at Kennet, all became familiar to him; and the royal castle, as it existed in all its splendour in the reign of Henry III., was almost as real to him as the beautiful seventeenth-century building which had replaced it, and which, after so many vicissitudes, had become the home of the new school.

The school library at Marlborough was well provided with works on archæology and ecclesiastical architecture. Through these he ranged at will. His power of assimilation was prodigious; and he left Marlborough, he used to say afterwards, a good archæologist, and knowing most of what there was to be known about English Gothic. This interest in churches was reinforced by another influence which now came for the first time into his life, that of the Anglo-Catholic movement. The college, though not founded by any theological party, had a distinctly High Church character. Blore's chapel, now demolished to make room for a larger and statelier