Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/558

ÆT. 51] Concluded" in July, 1886. Of his prose contributions, signed and unsigned, and ranging from carefully written leading articles down to brief notes hastily set down to fill up a column, there is little to say except that he no more than other men escaped the vices of journalism when he took to being a journalist.

Another visit to Oxford in February was more eventful than the one of fifteen months before, so far at least as the behaviour of the meeting went. The Clarendon Rooms had been refused for this meeting on account of the fear of disturbance, and it was held in the Music Room in Holywell. Opinion on both sides had stiffened; and Faulkner had, two or three weeks before, for a speech he had made to a little Socialist meeting in Cowley, been stigmatized in the sedate columns of the Oxford Magazine as an alehouse anarchist. The social enthusiasm which had been so strong in 1883 was beginning to cool down among a fresh generation of undergraduates. But for the healthy young Tory Morris had always a lurking sympathy, and he writes the account of his experiences in the highest spirits.

"Wednesday I went to Oxford with the Avelings: we went by the early train, and all turned out well, and even amusing: we walked about Oxford a good deal, and even with all the horrors done to it, it looks very well and beautiful on such a bright afternoon as we had. There were terrible threats about what the lads were going to do, which I didn't suppose would come to much: we met, some of us, in University Common Room to settle the meeting, and it seems the enemy sent in a spy, which however we survived. Charley had asked a great many very young persons to dinner, and their ingenuous visages made me feel rather old. So to the meeting we went, in a room in