Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/706

ÆT. 60] the Press in July, 1894. It is only due to Mr. Cockerell to say that these last years of Morris's life were greatly lightened by his diligence and devotion. For the first time in his life his papers were kept in order: the labour of correspondence, which had always been irksome to him, and was one of the few things that he felt as really hard work, was relieved: his library was catalogued; and the conduct, not only of the Press, but of his whole business, was made as easy to him as the nature of the case admitted. The relations between them grew to be of great intimacy and confidence, and added much to the happiness of both.

At the beginning of 1893 the beautiful little series of translations from thirteenth-century French prose romances which were printed by Morris in this and the following year began to be projected. "There is a little book," he wrote in January, "of the Librairie Elzévirienne hight Contes et Nouvelles de la XIIIme Siècle: two of these are amongst the most beautiful works of the Middle Ages, and I intend translating them, and printing in a nice little book in Chaucer type. Probably I shall design some two-coloured letters for it."

The work of which he misquotes the title with his characteristic carelessness when he was writing a letter, "Nouvelles Françoises en prose du XIIIme Siècle," a little book published in 1856, had for thirty years been one of the treasures of literature to him. Together with the "Violier des Histoires Romaines," which appeared in the same series two years later, it had been among the first sources of his knowledge of the French romance of the Middle Ages. In thanking Morris for a copy of the last of the three little Kelmscott volumes, Mr. Swinburne recalls their delight in reading the French "in the days when we