Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/747

338 many." In his own library one day before Christmas, a visitor looking over the sheets that were lying on the table remarked on the added beauty of those sheets following the Canterbury Tales where picturepages face one another in pairs. Morris took alarm.

"Now don't you go saying that to Burne-Jones," he said, "or he'll be wanting to do the first part over again; and the worst of that would be, that he'd want to do all the rest over again, because the other would be so much better, and then we should never get done, but always be going round and round in a circle."

The last of the eighty-seven pictures was finished two days after Christmas. In the same week Morris had begun to write the story of "The Sundering Flood," the last of his prose romances. During that December he had enriched his collection of manuscripts by two splendid examples of the thirteenth century, for which he paid upwards of a thousand pounds; one a folio Bible, in three volumes, of French work of the end of the century, and the other a Psalter of slightly earlier date, variously ascribed to Rouen or Beauvais, and richly adorned with miniatures in the finest manner of that fine period.

With the turn of the year the weakness that had been gaining on him for some months became much more pronounced. He now suffered from an exhausting cough; he was losing flesh noticeably, and sleeplessness became a regular feature of his nights. He wrote a little of "The Sundering Flood" every day, and did work nearly every day for initials and borders for the Kelmscott Press editions of "The Well at the World's End" and "The Earthly Paradise." But his working hours became shorter and shorter. In February another visit to Rottingdean was tried, but he was languid and made no improvement. On his re-