Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/702

ÆT. 59] for the Kelmscott Chaucer, after a momentary hesitation caused by his having seen for the first time the earlier or semi-Gothic type ("what asses they were to change it for the Roman type" is his characteristic comment) used by Sweynheym and Pannartz for the Subiaco Lactantius. Much of the immense vitality of earlier years still survived, though more and more fitfully: on the 9th of April, "happening to be awake at 6 a.m. I went and got my book and wrote several pages of story." In May he was beginning to see daylight at last with "The Golden Legend." The two magnificent drawings by Burne-Jones of the Earthly and Heavenly Paradises had been completed, and the first was now being cut on the wood. Both were touched up for the wood-engraver by Mr. Fairfax Murray in a photographic copy. The last sheet of the text was read by Morris in proof on the 31st of May. The large printer's mark with a picture of the house at Kelmscott in it, which Morris then meant to design for his colophon, was not executed, and was replaced in the book as it appeared by the device which had already appeared in several of the smaller books, a small design with the words "Kelmscott" and "William Morris" in Gothic lettering on a floriated background and border.

Meanwhile Morris sought consolation for any occasional qualms that he may have had as to the artistic limitations of the finest printed books in a more and more impassioned devotion to thirteenth-century manuscripts. At the sale of the Lawrence collection this month he spent £250 on three of those, a little Psalter and little Book of Hours and the fragment of a folio Bible. Nearly all summer through he stayed in London by his Press, though with wistful thoughts now and again of haymaking going on fast in the big