In passing, it is well to note that this impulse in the heart of William
Morris to come to the defense of an accused person was ever very strong.
His defense of Mrs. Browning led straight to "The Defense of Guinevere,"
begun while at Oxford and printed in book form in his twenty-fourth year.
Not that the offenses of Guinevere and Elizabeth Barrett were parallel,
but Morris was by nature a defender of women. And it should further be
noted that Tennyson had not yet written his "Idylls of the King,"-at the
time Morris wrote his poetic brief.

Another author that these young men took up at this time was Ruskin. John
Ruskin was fifteen years older than Morris--an Oxford man, too; also, the
son of a merchant and rich by inheritance. Ruskin's natural independence,
his ability for original thinking and his action in embracing the cause of
Turner, the ridiculed, won the heart of Morris. In Ruskin he found a
writer who expressed the thoughts that he believed. He read Ruskin, and
insisted that Burne-Jones should. Together they read "The Nature of
Gothic," and then they went out upon the streets of Oxford and studied
examples at first hand. They compared the old with the new, and came to
the conclusion that the buildings erected two centuries before had various
points to recommend them which modern buildings have not. The modern
buildings were built by contractors, while the old ones were constructed
by men who had all the time there was, and so they worked out their
conceptions of the eternal fitness of things.

Then these young men, with several others, drew up a remonstrance against
"the desecration by officious restoration, and the tearing down of
time-mellowed structures to make room for the unsightly brick piles of
boarding-house keepers."