views in his writings as well as in all the other work he did
throughout his life.

He was born in 1834. His father, a member of a business firm in the
City of London, was a wealthy man and lived in Essex, in a country
house with large gardens and fields belonging to it, on the edge of
Epping Forest. Until the age of thirteen Morris was at home among a
large family of brothers and sisters. He delighted in the country
life and especially in the Forest, which is one of the most romantic
parts of England, and which he made the scene of many real and
imaginary adventures. From fourteen to eighteen he was at school at
Marlborough among the Wiltshire downs, in a country full of beauty and
history, and close to another of the ancient forests of England, that
of Savernake. He proceeded from school to Exeter College, Oxford,
where he soon formed a close friendship with a remarkable set of young
men of his own age; chief among these, and Morris's closest friend for
the rest of his life, was Edward Burne-Jones, the painter. Study of
the works of John Ruskin confirmed them in the admiration which they
already felt for the life and art of the Middle Ages. In the summer
vacation of 1855 the two friends went to Northern France to see the
beautiful towns and splendid churches with which that country had been
filled between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries; and there
they made up their minds that they cared for art more than for
anything else, such as wealth or ease or the opinion of the world,
and that as soon as they left Oxford they would become artists.
By art they meant the making of beauty for the adornment and
enrichment of human life, and as artists they meant to strive against
all that was ugly or mean or untruthful in the life of their own time.

Art, as they understood it, is one single thing covering the whole