Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/491

82 after small and certain if possible: little would be my grief at that same. This is looking at the worst side, which I think one ought to do; but I think we shall on the whole succeed; though a rich man (so-called) I never either can or will become: nay, I am trying in a feeble way to be more thrifty—whereof no more, lest I boast now and be disgraced at Christmas.

"I have been reading more of Carlyle's life, and find it deeply interesting in spite of Froude; usually I find biographies dull to extremity, I suppose because they are generally a mass of insincerities and platitudes: but in this book is a man speaking who can say what he thinks even in a letter (I wish I could). I like him much the better for having read this book, after that other mass of moodiness, and I fare to feel as if he were on the right side in spite of all faults.

"I have to go now to Oxford Street and then to the Mansion House to the Icelandic Relief Committee, which I am afraid owing to the time of the year is like to be a dead failure."

A week later he writes again:

"I have not been well, and there have been other troubles also of which I won't speak, and the sum of all has rather made me break down.

"I hope I am not quite unhumble, or want to be the only person in the world untroubled; but I have been ever loth to think that there were no people going through life, not without pain indeed, but with simplicity and free from blinding entanglements. Such an one I want to be, and my faith is that it is possible for most men to be no worse. Yet indeed I am older, and the year is evil; the summerless season, and famine and war, and the folly of peoples come back again, as it were, and the more and more obvious death of art before it rises again, are heavy