gradually occupied with him, or about his affairs, and without any
wish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children.
I remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had
distracted Morris' thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the
conversation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at
Swinburne. 'Oh, Swinburne,' said Morris, 'is a rhetorician; my
masters have been Keats and Chaucer for they make pictures.' 'Does
not Milton make pictures?' asked my informant. 'No,' was the
answer, 'Dante makes pictures, but Milton, though he had a great
earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician.' 'Great earnest
mind,' sounded strange to me and I doubt not that were his
questioner not a simple man, Morris had been more violent. Another
day the same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was
worse and Morris cursed Chaucer for destroying the English
language with foreign words.

He had few detachable phrases and I can remember little of his
speech, which many thought the best of all good talk, except that
it matched his burly body and seemed within definite boundaries
inexhaustible in fact and expression. He alone of all the men I
have known seemed guided by some beast-like instinct and never ate
strange meat. 'Balzac! Balzac!' he said to me once, 'Oh, that was
the man the French bourgeoisie read so much a few years ago.' I
can remember him at supper praising wine: 'Why do people say it is
prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the
sunlight and the sap?' and his dispraising houses decorated by
himself: 'Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a
house like a big barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in
another corner, slept in the third corner & in the fourth received
one's friends'; and his complaining of Ruskin's objection to the