Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/732

ÆT. 61] know him well the sense of mingled oddness and pathos that the words gave. Two days later, on a Sunday morning in Buscot Wood, he talked for some two hours on end on the principles of conducting business, with all his old keen insight and fertility of illustration. It was noticeable how he seemed to speak of the whole matter as, for himself, a past experience. One of the visitors at Kelmscott that week was Sir Edward Burne-Jones's little grandson, in whose favour Morris discarded any prejudices which he might have against children other than his own; for outside of his own family he was not a lover of children, and seldom took any notice of them. "As to Denis, he is the dearest little chap," he writes on the 3rd of October, "and as merry as the day is long—all that a gentleman of his age should be: everybody paid him the attention which he deserves." The Kelmscott holiday—during which, however, he was steadily at work designing borders and initials for the Chaucer—was prolonged till the beginning of November.

Soon after he returned to London the first elections were being held under the Local Government Act of 1894, which had been the latest and the most important achievement of Mr. Gladstone's administration. Morris was at once too preoccupied with his own work, and too disillusioned by his own experience, to feel any very deep interest in the matter. He did not go to Kelmscott to attend the inaugural parish meeting: in London he voted, but did no more. It was claimed for the Act by some enthusiasts that it reconstituted a framework of administration which was essentially that of the Middle Ages, and indeed went back in some points even beyond them. But to him it seemed too artificial, and too much encumbered