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198 weal." It was performed there on the 15th of October, Morris himself acting in it, and was so successful that it was repeated three times. The dramatic form was one which he had essayed long before in a very different material. "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," "The Fall of Troy," and "Love is Enough," are a trilogy which is strangely concluded by this satyric piece.

In the contemporary theatre and in the modern actor's art Morris had not, and never affected to have, the slightest interest. From a very different point of view, he had for many years come to the same conclusion as Matthew Arnold in pronouncing the modern English theatre the most debased in Europe. Since the days of his early enthusiasm for Robson and Kean he hardly ever had gone to a play, unless on some rare occasion when he took his children or was dragged off by a friend. Nor has "The Tables Turned" anything that can be called a plot, any dramatic artifice, or any characterization beyond that of a mediæval mystery play. "If he had started a Kelmscott Theatre," says one of the most enthusiastic and most paradoxical of his followers, "instead of the Kelmscott Press, I am quite confident that in a few months, without going half a mile afield for his company, he would have produced work that would within ten years have affected every theatre in Europe." As a personal impression this assertion is interesting, but unverifiable. As a matter of fact nothing came of the experiment in which the method of the Townley Mysteries was applied to a modern farce. "Morris was so interested," the critic just quoted adds, "by his experiment in this sort of composition that he for some time talked of trying his hand at a serious drama, and would no doubt have done it had there been any practical occasion for it, or any means of consummating it by stage