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98 was nearly always ready to respond to the call for new designs that were really needed, and to apply his strong common sense to questions that were submitted for his decision.

There are several indications that when he now plunged into politics, he was on the brink of a new departure in the field of romance. One may even conjecture the path it would have taken. The heroic cycle of Iran had long held in his mind a place next to those of Greece and Scandinavia. "He loved everything Persian," Sir Edward Burne-Jones says, "including the wild confusion of their chronology." His profound study of Oriental design in its application to pottery and textiles had recently reinforced his interest in the Persian epic. At the beginning of 1883 he was deep in Mohl's French translation of the Shah Nameh, and had begun a version of his own from the French into English, of which a considerable fragment was executed. But now, under a constraining sense of social duty, this and all other literary plans were given up by him for the service of the Federation. It was nearly three years later before he once more returned to imaginative work—though still with a political aim and inspiration—in "The Dream of John Ball." In those three years he had indeed produced a large volume of writing. But it was not of a kind which possessed literary value, or was meant for permanence. With the exception of some dozen fragments of poetry, and as many lectures on the relation of art to social conditions, and to the life of mankind, it was professedly and even ostentatiously journalism.

An interesting light is thrown on his attitude of mind at this time by a letter written in January to Mr. Manson, his old colleague on the executive of the National Liberal League. It was in answer to some