Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/703

294 meadow, and of the hollyhocks in the garden at Kelmscott. Burne-Jones was beginning the series of drawings for Chaucer, and the form and detail of the great folio was taking definite shape in Morris's mind. By the middle of September the printing of the Interminable was done, the two great full-page woodcuts being the last part, as they were the most anxious, to print. On the 16th it went off, in two cartloads, in joyful procession to the binders. To celebrate the auspicious and long-awaited event Morris bought a vellum copy of Jenson's "Clementis Constitutiones" of 1476, and then took himself off to Kelmscott.

Once the Press was released from "The Golden Legend," the production of smaller books went on through the winter of 1892–3 with accelerated and almost reckless speed. The reprint of Caxton's "Historyes of Troye," the first book issued in the large Gothic type which Morris had designed in 1891, as the famous original had been, more than four hundred years before, the first book printed in English, is dated the 14th of October. It was rapidly succeeded by the "Biblia Innocentium," dated 22nd October; "News from Nowhere," dated 22nd November; and the reprint of Caxton's "Reynard the Foxe" of 1481, dated 15th December. This last Morris accounted far and away the best of all Caxton's books in its literary quality: "he has the true smell and smile." Then followed the "Poems of William Shakespeare," dated 17th January, 1893; and after it, the reprint of Caxton's "Order of Chivalry" of 1484, dated 10th November, 1892, but held back in order to be issued in a single volume together with another little book. This was the text and Morris's own verse translation of "L'Ordene de Chevalerie," a French poem of the thirteenth century which has