would probably stamp his character.’  Few of the word-portraits in Miss Wotton’s book can be said to have been drawn by a great artist, but they are all interesting, and Miss Wotton has certainly shown a wonderful amount of industry in collecting her references and in grouping them.  It is not a book to be read through from beginning to end, but it is a delightful book to glance at, and by its means one can raise the ghosts of the dead, at least as well as the Psychical Society can.

(1) Leaves of Life.  By E. Nesbit. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(2) The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.  By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan Paul.)

(3) Dorinda.  By Lady Munster. (Hurst and Blackett.)

(4) Four Biographies from ‘Blackwood.’  By Mrs. Walford. (Blackwood and Sons.)

(5) Word Portraits of Famous Writers.  Edited by Mabel Wotton. (Bentley and Son.)

MR. WILLIAM MORRIS’S LAST BOOK

(Pall Mall Gazette, March 2, 1889.)

Mr. Morris’s last book is a piece of pure art workmanship from beginning to end, and the very remoteness of its style from the common language and ordinary interests of our day gives to the whole story a strange beauty and an unfamiliar charm.  It is written in blended prose and verse, like the mediaeval ‘cante-fable,’ and tells the tale of the House of the Wolfings in its struggles against the legionaries of Rome then advancing into Northern Germany.  It is a kind of Saga, and the language in which the folk-epic, as we may call it, is set forth recalls the antique dignity and directness of our English tongue four centuries ago.  From an artistic point of view it may be described as an attempt to return by a self-conscious effort to the conditions of an earlier and a fresher age.  Attempts of this kind are not uncommon in the history of art.  From some such feeling came the Pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day and the archaistic movement of later Greek sculpture.  When the result is beautiful the method is justified, and no shrill insistence upon a supposed necessity for absolute modernity of form can prevail against the value of work that has the incomparable excellence of style.  Certainly, Mr. Morris’s work possesses this excellence.  His fine harmonies and rich cadences create in the reader that spirit by which alone can its own spirit be interpreted, awake in him something of the temper of romance and, by taking him out of his own age, place him in a truer and more vital relation to the great masterpieces of all time.  It is a bad thing for an age to be always looking in art for its own reflection.  It is well that, now and then, we are given work that is nobly imaginative in its method and purely artistic in its aim.  As we read Mr. Morris’s story with its fine alternations of verse and prose, its decorative and descriptive beauties, its wonderful handling of romantic and adventurous themes, we cannot but feel that we are as far removed from the ignoble fiction as we are from the ignoble facts of our own day.  We breathe a purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and was simple and stately and complete.