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200 were like. "To the best of my remembrance," he states in evidence, "there were present at the commencement of your discourse but three persons exclusive of yourself"—namely, a colleague of the lecturer, the Archbishop himself, and a small boy. The discourse "was a mass of the most frightful incendiarism. He even made an attack on my position, stating (wrongly) the amount of my moderate stipend." The audience, he further states, had increased to ten by the time the orator concluded. The scene, which was received by the audience, most of them familiar with those Sunday street meetings, with uncontrolled amusement, gave the ludicrous side of a bitter truth. Often Morris had himself spoken, both in doors and out of doors, to as small an audience. A few months earlier, a lecture on Feudal England, into which no other man alive could have put an equal combination of historical knowledge, imaginative insight, and romantic sympathy, had been delivered to an audience of nine people, not one of whom probably understood what it was about. That such entire public apathy regarding the Socialist ideal should co-exist with the presence of revolution actually at the door (the trial in this play is broken off by its triumphal outbreak) is a situation well enough suited for a farce which is intentionally and wildly extravagant. But it seems that even then the combination was one in which the more ardent members of the League had not in the least abandoned belief.

For that strange belief, in which Morris no doubt had once to a certain degree shared ("as his way was about everything, to make it something different from what it was," the habit of boyhood surviving undiminished into mature life), the events of the next month in London gave some sort of colour. A long-