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288 his deepest love; he would willingly at any time have exchanged the National Gallery and all its contents for the cases of painted books in the British Museum. A man may be known by his company, inanimate as well as human; and while Morris had a small but choice collection of painted books among his chief treasures, and gladly paid large sums to secure one, his house was, with a few exceptions for which there were special reasons, pictureless, and he never bought a picture after the early days when he had ceased trying to paint them.

From this brief excursion into art criticism he returned to the work of his printing-press. In November he was discussing the printing of all his own works, meaning then to begin with the "Sigurd." A second and larger press had been bought, and a new pressman and two new compositors engaged; and the printing of the Interminable, as "The Golden Legend" had come to be called, was making rapid progress. Before the end of the year he was discussing the form of the great Chaucer which it was his ambition to print. The Troy type, the first of his two Gothic founts, had been cut and was then being cast: but "it is so big that it is no use thinking of printing the Chaucer in double columns with it unless the book were to be as big as Eggestein's Gratian's Decretum,"—a leviathan among printed books, of which an uncut copy measures twenty inches by fifteen and weighs nearly thirty pounds. Before the end of the year he had determined on having another fount cut smaller from the same designs; and these two, with the original Roman or "Golden" fount, were the only three that he actually produced and printed from, though in the course of the year 1892 he partially designed another. "I am at work at my story and other trifles," he writes to