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182 'Wearied by efforts in London to keep the peace between impossible elements in the League, it was no small pleasure to him to meet these men who delighted in him, and who gathered around him in the evenings clamouring for news from down south, and singing him old ballads and rollicking college songs till the small hours. Like their friend from the south, they had their minds fixed on the ultimate goal of perfect freedom and on the immediate study and understanding of the claims of Socialism. Bruce Glasier, perhaps thanks to his mother, a sympathetic lady of Gaelic blood, had a strong poetic strain in him too, and enthusiasm of a quality that years have not impaired.'

Morris was so frankly outspoken in all his utterances, public and private, that except with regard to occasional personal remarks about his colleagues and other people, and concerning some of his more private affairs, his letters rarely reveal any shade of opinion or deliverance, which those who are generally acquainted with his writings would discover with surprise. But they reveal some of those traits of point-blankness of opinion, or right-downness of conviction, and above all those whimsicalities of mood, which as a rule he only permitted himself to express in his freest conversations with friends.

In all I received some seventy letters from him, but possess now only fifty-six of them, as I gave some away to comrades who were eager to possess a memento of him. The letters cover a period of ten years, from February 1886 to September 1896—a few weeks before he died. The majority of them were written between the years 1887 and 1889, when I was associated with him in the work of the Socialist League. After that period I rarely corresponded with him by letter, as I had during the succeeding three or four years to go more frequently to London, and saw him often at Hammersmith.

The letters relate chiefly to the work of the Socialist League, especially to the internal controversies in the party, and to the Commonweal. They contain, however,