Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/701

292 tects "had not learned how to forge, and put some of their own thought, poor as that was, into it," was accordingly destroyed. It was replaced by "dead-alive office work," covered with "what is called ecclesiastical sculpture—so utterly without life or interest that nobody who passes under the portal of the church on which it is plastered treats it as a work of art any more than he does the clergyman's surplice," "a joyless, putty-like imitation, that had better have been a plaster-cast." As for the "pieces of undertakers' upholstery" within the church, all that could be done with them was to let them alone. "The burden of their ugliness must be endured, at any rate until the folly of restoration has died out; for the greater part of them have been built into the fabric, and their removal would leave gaps, not so unsightly indeed as those stupid masses of marble, but tempting to the restorer, who would make them excuses for further introduction of modern work."

"It may seem strange," Morris adds, rising into the higher plane of his habitual thoughts, "that whereas we can give some distinguished name as the author of almost every injury it has received, the authors of this great epic itself have left no names behind them. For indeed it is the work of no one man, but of the people of south-eastern England. It was the work of the inseparable will of a body of men, who worked, as they lived, because they could do no otherwise, and unless you can bring these men back from the dead, you cannot 'restore' one verse of their epic. Rewrite the lost trilogies of Æschylus, put a beginning and an end to the Fight at Finsbury, finish the Squire's Tale for Chaucer, and if you can succeed in that, you may then 'restore' Westminster Abbey."

By this time the smaller Gothic fount was being cut