Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/510

ÆT. 49] gives a human warmth to generosity, and may elevate even inconsiderate profusion into a moral excellence. That habit of magnificence, which to the Greek mind was the crown of virtues, was Rossetti's most remarkable quality. In the nature of Morris it had no place. "I am bourgeois, you know, and therefore without the point of honour," he had written many years before to Madox Brown in a moment of real self-appreciation; and his virtues were those of the bourgeois class—industrious, honest, fair-minded up to their lights, but unexpansive and unsympathetic—so far as the touch of genius did not transform him into something quite unique and incalculable.

There is a pleasant sketch of one of his frequent visits to Paris, in company with Mr. Armstrong, on the affairs of the South Kensington Museum, in a letter to his daughter at the end of that January. They crossed together on a stormy moonlit night, "so that we could see the waves at any rate, and they were very fine indeed. We slept on the road to Paris after a fashion, but it was so cold that it was a sort of dog-sleep, and the inn-room, and wood-fire and coffee and rolls were sweet to us when we got there. Armstrong took me to dine at a simple place he knew, where we were welcome and paid but moderately: by the way, seeing goujons on the bill, I insisted on having them, and very good they were. The trees in the Tuileries gardens have suffered very much even since we were there: it is sad to see, for I remember when I first came to Paris and was high up aloft with Aunt Henrietta at Meurice's they were so thick they looked as if you could walk on their tops. We were very busy over our proper business both days, but managed to see the Cluny, being close by; also a new Museum of casts of Gothic sculpture at the