Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/707

298 first foregathered at Oxford" nearly forty years before. On two of the stories in the French volume, "Le Conte de l'Empereur CoustantConstant [sic]" and "L'Amitié d'Amis et d'Amile," he had based two of the stories for "The Earthly Paradise"; the former appears in the work under the title of "The Man Born to be King"; the latter was the never published poem of "Amis and Amillion." He now translated and printed these and two others. The fifth, the famous pastoral romance of Aucassin and Nicolete, he left untouched, as it was already well known in two English versions. The first of the stories which Morris published, a translation of the romance entitled "Le Conte du Roi Flore et de la Belle Jehanne," was issued under the title of "The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane" at the end of this year. It is dated 16th of December, 1893. "Amis and Amile" succeeded it in April, 1894: "the Amis and Amile I translated in one day and a quarter, it was very easy: a most beautiful little book"; and "The Tale of the Emperor Coustans," with which was included a fourth story, "L'Histoire d'Outre-Mer," entitled in the English "The History of Over Sea," in the following September. The project of two-colour letters printed from double blocks was never carried out by him in these or any other of the Kelmscott Press books, though several designs in red and blue were made by him for that purpose.

"I am very busy all round, and ought to be busier, but can't be," he cheerfully writes in March. He had set to work on designing the ornament for the Kelmscott Chaucer. That for the first page was just finished to his complete satisfaction. "My eyes! how good it is!" was his own criticism on it. He had also begun his metrical version of "Beowulf." That great fragment of the earliest English epic he had