Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/406

ÆT. 45] nine, and even for ten, hours. The total is 516 hours in the four months; and this was the work of a man who had a hundred other things to attend to, and who was never in a hurry! This tapestry-loom was for his own private use. The coach-house and stables adjoining the house were converted into a large weavingroom, the room afterwards used as the meeting-place of the Hammersmith Socialists. Carpet-looms were built there, and were soon regularly at work producing the fabrics which became known under the name of the Hammersmith carpets and rugs from this accident of their first origin.

During the winter of 1878–9, in fact, weaving in its various forms—on the Jacquard loom for figured silks, on the carpet-loom for pile carpets, and on the tapestry-loom for Arras tapestries—replaced dyeing as the chief object of Morris's interest. The regular work in examining at South Kensington, which he had begun two years before and which he continued till his last illness, had contributed to an increased interest in textiles. He had undertaken that work partly out of a feeling of gratitude for the immense service which the collections at the South Kensington Museum had been to him personally as a designer and manufacturer: "perhaps," he said incidentally in his evidence before the Royal Commission of 1882, "I have used it as much as any man living." The national collections there owe very much to him. For the last fifteen years of his life no important purchase of either textiles or embroideries was ever made without consulting him. "He never failed me," the Director of Art at South Kensington tells me, "and cheerfully put aside his own business when he knew that we had urgent need of his services. On one occasion he went with me to Paris at a few hours' notice and in very bad Rh