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ÆT. 51] the other provincial centres where he gave these addresses. "I am in a hurry, as I always am now," is one unusual, and coming from him, even pathetic sentence in a letter. In March, writing to Faulkner about the formation of a branch of the Federation at Oxford, he expresses in a few strong words the uncompromising attitude he had taken up towards those who sympathized and hesitated, or whose tenets did not wholly coincide with his own. A number of liberal Churchmen—most of them belonging to the advanced High Church party in matters of ritual and doctrine—had once more taken up the Christian Socialism of Maurice and Kingsley. "Meantime," he comments, "the Christian Church has always declared against Socialism; its mainstays must always be property and authority. A worthy Irish Catholic member of the resigned on those grounds when we declared for Socialism. Of course as long as people are ignorant, compromise plus sentiment always looks better to them than the real article."

In April the weekly evening at Burne-Jones's house, which had been the habit of so many years, finally ceased, crowded out by the multiplicity of new engagements. The one gleam of real pleasure that the year brought him was a reconciliation, of which one of his visits to Manchester was the immediate occasion, with Madox Brown. "You are aware," he wrote of it to Mr. Rowley, "that there has been a cloud between him and me, and I am more than rejoiced it should be cleared off in such a pleasant way by my old friend himself, for whom I have always had the greatest respect and affection."

A Hammersmith Branch of the Democratic Federation had been formed in June in order to organize work among the labouring population of the district.