Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/744

ÆT. 62] iron roof. It quite sickened me when I saw it. That's the way all things are going now. In twenty years everything will be gone in this countryside, which twenty years ago was so rich in beautiful building: and we can do nothing to help it or mend it. The world had better say, 'Let us be through with it and see what will come after it!' In the meantime I can do nothing but a little bit of Anti-Scrape—sweet to eye while seen. Now that I am grown old and see that nothing is to be done, I half wish that I had not been born with a sense of romance and beauty in this accursed age."

But a week afterwards he had so far rallied from this fit of depression as to be in great excitement over the new scheme for the folio edition of his own "Sigurd the Volsung," for which Burne-Jones had just agreed to design at least five and twenty pictures. "I am afire to see the new designs," he wrote to Burne-Jones, "which I have no doubt will do—and as to the age, that be blowed!"

During the winter he still went on lecturing from time to time as his strength allowed. On the 30th of October, at the request of Mr. Hines, a Radical and Socialist chimney-sweep in Oxford, with whom he had a longstanding acquaintance, dating from the early days of the Socialist movement, he gave an address to inaugurate the newly-founded Oxford Socialist Union. A month later he spoke—"to the point and impressively," a hearer says—at the funeral of Sergius Stepniak, in the foggy drizzle outside Waterloo Station. During December he lectured twice in London, on English architecture and on Gothic illustrations to printed books. The latter lecture, delivered at the Bolt Court Technical School, was the last he gave with his old vigour. On the 3rd of January he attended the New