Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/711

302 The noble figures of the Virgin, of St. Edward the Confessor, and of St. John the Baptist, as they now lie stored in the basement of the Convocation House, may be specially cited as examples, apart from any question of historic interest, of the purest feeling and most consummate artistic excellence. Of the copies by which they have been replaced on the base of the now doubly and triply reconstructed mass of pinnacles from which the central spire springs into the sunlight, it may be left to future generations to judge. But the judgment will be—so Morris insisted—upon works of the nineteenth century which profess to be, and are not, works of nearly six hundred years earlier.

The death of Tennyson in October, 1892, had left vacant the titular primacy of English poetry, which he had held for forty-two years. When the question of appointing a new Poet Laureate was opened, the name of Morris, as by amount and quality of actual work produced undoubtedly among the foremost of living English poets, was one of those which could not be ignored. His political creed would indeed have assorted but strangely with the holding of an orifice in the Royal Household; nor could any one who knew him, however slightly, think without a smile of his writing official odes, or posing as the eulogist of the existing order and the triumphs of the Victorian age. As regards his personal views on the matter, Mr. Gladstone, who had then just become for the fourth time Prime Minister, kept his own counsel: and it is matter of common knowledge that no recommendation was ever made by him to the Queen, and that the office remained unfilled for three years during his Government and the administration which succeeded it. But after this lapse of time it may not be indiscreet to say that Morris was sounded by a member of the Cabinet, with