Morris both failed to carry their public with them all the way. Gray,
the most cultured man of his time, produced art forms totally different
from those in vogue, and Walpole[1] said of these forms: "Gray has
added to his poems three ancient odes from Norway and Wales ... they are
not interesting, and do not, like his other poems, touch any passion....
Who can care through what horrors a Runic savage arrived at all the joys
and glories they could conceive--the supreme felicity of boozing ale out
of the skull of an enemy in Odin's Hall?"

Morris, the most versatile man of his time, found plenty of praise for
his art work, until he preached social reform to Englishmen. Thereafter
the art of William Morris was not so highly esteemed, and the best poet
in England failed to attain the laurel on the death of Tennyson.

Of this change of taste more will be said as this essay is developed.
These introductory words must not be left, however, without an
explanation of the word "Influence," as it is used in the subject-title.
This paper will not undertake to prove that the course of English
literature was diverted into new channels by the introduction of Old
Norse elements, or that its nature was materially changed thereby. We
find an expression and a justification of our present purpose in Richard
Price's Preface to the 1824 edition of Warton's "History of English
Poetry" (p. 15): "It was of importance to notice the successive
acquisitions, in the shape of translation or imitation, from the more
polished productions of Greece and Rome; and to mark the dawn of that
æra, which, by directing the human mind to the study of classical
antiquity, was to give a new impetus to science and literature, and by
the changes it introduced to effect a total revolution in the laws which
had previously governed them." Were Warton writing his history to-day,
he would have to account for later eras as well as for the Elizabethan,