Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/417

8 description is highly characteristic—"he had a knack at times of hammering away at his point until he had said exactly what he wanted to say in exactly the words he wished to use, rocking to and fro the while from one foot to the other."

After the elections of 1880 had replaced a Liberal Government in power, his political partisanship rapidly fell away from him. Like the wave of popular feeling which turned those elections, it had been roused on particular issues, and was kept alive rather by hostility to Lord Beaconsfield's policy than by any great affection for the Cabinet which replaced his. The enthusiasm of 1880 barely lived out the year. The Irish Coercion Bill of 1881 finally destroyed it. In the November following, Morris took an actively joyful part in winding up the affairs of the National Liberal League. The social reforms which he had at heart he saw disappearing amid an ocean of Whiggery, which he no more loved than he did Toryism. "I think some raison d'être might be found for us," he wrote in handing over the accounts when he resigned the treasurership, "if we had definite work to do: I do so hate—this in spite of my accounts—everything vague in politics as well as in art." But definite work of the kind he meant was not then in the programme of the Liberal party. Very soon Morris's attitude towards current politics became one of mere irritation and contempt. "Toryism, a system of common robbery, is nevertheless far better than Whiggism—a compound of petty larceny, popular instruction, and receiving of stolen goods": so runs a well-known passage in "The Romany Rye"; and Morris's way of regarding politics had much in common with Borrow's. Gradually but inevitably he became one of a party to whom Canning's famous phrase took a new meaning; and who resolved,