became for him a forcing-place for that peculiar quality of
     mediaeval thought and culture, which, in his mature
     years, permeated his personality and vivified every piece
     of work, intellectual and manual, proceedin  from him.
     Concerning the gracious influences of the ol university
     town, he wrote late in life:
                              "There are many     places in
England where a young man may get as good book-
     learning as in Oxford; but not one where he can receive
     the education which the loveliness of the grey city used to
     give us
                              The impulse toward mediaeval-
     ism was further strengthened in Morris, during his under-
     graduate days, by a study tour through the cathedral
     towns of France,-notably Rouen and Amiens,-as well
     as by a course of reading which gained him an intimate
     acquaintance with Froissart and with the Arthurian
     legends: two wells of thought from whose inexhaustible
     depths he drew an endless chain of artistic motifs.
                              The development of his social
     and political ideas was slower and later than his advance-
     ment in literature and art.   During his residence at
  "  Oxford, he saw no objection to the monarchical principle;
     but yet, in the abandonment of his purpose to take Holy
     Orders, we may see the beginning of his revolt against
     constituted authority. The secularization of his mind, the
     widening of his interests convinced him that art and liter-
     ature were not mere handmaidens of religion, but rather
     interests to be pursued for their own sake; that they were
     no less than the means of realizing life. For a short
   !, period indeed, he had cherished the idea of founding a
     religious Brotherhood whose patron was to be Sir Galahad
     of the Arthurian legend, and whose rules should include
     both celibacy and conventual life. But the idea of a com-
     mon organized effort toward a higher life, which had been
     planned by Morris and his group of associates-Burne-
     Jones, Faulkner and others-gradually changed from the


WILLIAM MvORRIS


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