Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/632

ÆT. 55] "I am really surprised at your not liking 'Tom Sawyer,' especially as it so very like Shakespeare, not to say Shelley.

"I went out in the afternoon of Saturday, and a most grim and stormy afternoon it was: I caught nothing except that just as I was going away a ½ lb. chub took my gudgeon and insisted on being caught. Saturday night was as cold as need be; but yesterday was better, and to-day is a mild beautiful morning: unhappily there is no river for me to-day, as we are all going to Fairford.

"I wish you had been here instead of the new comer, whose shortcomings I am not used to like I am to yours and mine; so that we have no standing cause of quarrel; which I think is a necessity to a really good understanding."

At the end of October, when "the river has grown small and bright and the fish won't bite," he regretfully left Kelmscott. On the 1st of November he lectured on Tapestry-weaving at the first Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society, to the catalogue of which he had already contributed a short paper on Textiles. Three Arras tapestries from the Merton Abbey looms were among the objects exhibited. The great series of tapestries from the Morte d'Arthur now hung at Stanmore Hall were then being put in hand. "The House of the Wolfings," too, had been finished during the autumn, and was through the press early in December.

Apart from other reasons this book has a special interest as marking the beginning of Morris's practical dealings with the art of typography. Hitherto he had been content to let his books be printed in the common way, without any special attention to matters of type or arrangement of page. His attention had been