Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/669

260 the sculpture at least belongs to the best work of the time. Outside the church and close to it is a huge Norman Castle, the enceinte quite complete, a piece of the keep left: a horrible modern prison and court house inside the old walls. Five minutes from the close gate towards the open country you come on the gate of the Roman town, quite unornamented, but sound and well-built. Down the slope of the hill are still left two twelfth-century houses. One of them, in honour surely of little Sir Hugh, is called the Jew's House; I cheapened an old chest there of a lady somewhat of Mrs. Wilfer's type, who received us with the dignity of a fallen Queen."

The fourth outing was a brief visit to Kelmscott. "I am steadily at work," he writes ten days later, "reading my own poems, because we are really going to bring out a one-volume 'Earthly Paradise' this autumn. Some people would say the work was hard. 'The Glittering Plain' I have finished some time, and begun another."

On the 8th of July he writes again: "I have undertaken to get out some of the Sagas I have lying about. Quaritch is exceedingly anxious to get hold of me, and received with enthusiasm a proposal to publish a Saga Library: item he will give me money (or perhaps I ought to say old books). We have got six letters of our new type done and have even had a scrap printed."

This type, the first produced for the Kelmscott Press, cost Morris almost infinite pains. "What I wanted," he writes of it himself in the Note on his aims in founding the Kelmscott Press, "was letter pure in form; severe, without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of the line which is the essential fault of the ordinary modern type, and