"I love you with a fourteenth-
century Florentine frenzy "is another declaration whose
alliterative catchiness conceals a deeper meaning than is
suspected by the many who applaud it. With an "airy
word" dropped here and there, "Patience" vitalizes the
history of the revolution effected in the externals of
English middle-class life by Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism and
all that this term implies.
                         The aesthetic movement was
far from being superficial; nor was it even confined to a
single branch of interest. It arose from roots hidden
deeply in English thought and life. It was perhaps
Walter Scott who, in his romances, first displayed a
real Lnediaevalism, when he dared, in the face of an
effete classic art to assert and glorify the majestic beauty
of Gothic architecture. Nextrcame the Anglo-Ca tholc
movement at Oxford, which although culminating in
1845 with the secession of John Newman to the Roman
Church, continued long afterward to be a prodigious
force; restoring to English churches and church services
                  thei
some part of their original beauty and symbolism, and
thence carrying into secular life a love of the Fine Arts,
which were regarded in the Middle Ages as the hand-
maidens ofI reigion. Another source of the aesthetic
movement is found in the writings of Ruskin, which
became for the Pre-Raphaelites a new gospel and a fixed
creed* Finally, the direct cause of the art movement
must be recognized in the powerful and self-centered
personality of Gabriel Rossetti, who drew after him and,
for a time, molded as he willed, the two younger men,
Morris and Burne-Jones, the real and effective workers in
the Pre-Raphaelite, or aesthetic movement.  These
three friends, together with Holman Hunt, John Everett
Millats and Madox Brown, laid the foundations for the
present eminence of English art, pictorial and decorative.
                         In 1821, John Constable pre-
dicted that within thirty years the art of his nation would


S4


WILLIAM MORRIS