To be related distantly to people of rank is a calamity; it gives the unhappy family social ambitions, and still not the power to lift themselves above snubs. They become social shuttlecocks, and see encouragement where only a little is given. Their anxiety and desire to please make them helpless and the playthings of the more fortunate, and old age finds them with no definite position, but

with the same ob

place, and it is not surprising that some of them find comfort abroad.

English people are never forgetful of services rendered. A public servant, long after his work has lost its value, may grow old in comfort and be spared the mortification of neglect. Londoners are charitable, and will patiently listen to a singer long after his fame has outlived his voice. A music hall audience will shout itself hoarse over a song which mentions Tom Sayers or any favorite of days gone by. In England a public man performs with a net under him,

in the shape of an easy office, into which he may drop when the work of his life is done. It relieves the strain on the nerves of his audience, and possibly the performance is longer, if not better.

On

The fact that Phil May is a prophet in his own country should alone clear Englishmen of the suspicion that they are slow to see fun. an Englishman's love of fair play and good sport no suspicion has ever rested. It is the most attractive thing about him, and it is only natural that the greatest assortment of good-natured people are to be found. at the Derby. I had already met them in May's drawings, and I was prepared to find the good-nature contagious. Last year a party on a coach opposite the Royal box and a policeman, who looked after that particular part of the course, drank champagne out of the same bottle.

An Englishman can tell at once in just what particular walk of life every other Englishman is; consequently, at home

lead Persimmon off the track, short men stood on boxes and balanced themselves by holding on to whoever stood next to them. Gypsy fortune-tellers and painted

faced minstrels climbed on the backs of coaches. Everyone shouted together and wished that the Prince had been a little taller, so that they might all have seen him. English-speaking people have been introduced to each other by a long line of clever draughtsmen. They have laughed together about the same people in the truest and sweetest-natured way in all the world. Above all others, one hand awakened the interest that finally grew into an intimacy resulting in people knowing themselves and others better. It has brought men together by its chivalrous praise of women, and women together by its fair treatment of men, and the same master-hand brought men and women together by the tender sympathy it showed for children and all

nature. The beautiful was safe in that gentle hand. Although the heart that guided it no longer beats, the human interest and kindly feeling that it awakened will live forever, and all the world has placed among the foremost men of his day the affectionately remembered name of George du Maurier.

These drawings were made among the most hospitable people I ever met. When I have failed, it has not been owing to a lack of interest, but more likely on account of a consciousness that my results would fall short of my desires. The disappointments following the completion of a drawing made from a beautiful woman are many. In these portraits I have the most to regret. C. D. G.

WHEN a man of so strong a personality, of such rich and varied gifts as the great poet and craftsman we have so recently lost, passes away, it is difficult at first to realize the fact, still less to measure the extent of that loss, especially for those who have enjoyed his personal friendship, and who have only associated him with the utmost energy and the full vigor of life and health and creative work.

Few men seemed to drink so full a measure of life as William Morris, and, indeed, he frankly admitted in his last days that he had enjoyed his life. I have heard

him say that he only knew what it was to be alive. He could not conceive of death, and the thought of it did not trouble him.

I first met William Morris in 1870, at a dinner at the house of the present Earl of Carlisle, a man of keen artistic sympathies and considerable artistic ability, notably in water-color landscapes. He was an enthusiast for the work of Morris and Burne-Jones, and had just built his house at Palace Green from the designs of Mr. Philip Webb, and Morris & Company had decorated it. Morris, I remember, had just returned from a visit to Iceland, and

could hardly talk of anything else. It seemed to have laid so strong a hold upon his imagination; and no doubt its literary fruits were the translations of the Icelandic sagas he produced with Professor Magnusson, and also the heroic poem of "Sigurd the Volzung." He never, indeed, seemed to lose the impressions of that Icelandic visit, and was ever ready to talk of his experiences there-the primitive life of the people, the long pony rides, the strange, stony deserts, the remote mountains, the geysers and the suggestions of volcanic force everywhere, and the romance-haunted coasts.

I well remember, too, the impression produced by the first volume of "The Earthly Paradise," which had appeared, I think, shortly before the time of which I speak the rich and fluent verse, with its simple, direct, Old World diction; the distinct vision, the romantic charm, the sense of external beauty everywhere, with a touch of wistfulness. The voice was the voice of a poet, but the eye was the eye of an artist and a craftsman.

It was not so long before that the fame began to spread of the little brotherhood

The Rose Trellis-Wall Paper Design.

Design for Wall Paper.

of artists who gathered together at the house at Redhill, built by Mr. Philip Webb, it was said, in an orchard without cutting down a single tree. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the centre of the group, the leading spirit, and he had absorbed the spirit of the Preraphaelite movement and centralized it both in painting and verse. But others co-operated at first, such as his master, Ford Madox Brown, and Mr. Arthur Hughes, until the committee of artists narrowed down, and became a firm, establishing workshops in one of the old-fashioned houses on the east side of Queen Square, Bloomsbury, a retired place, closed by a garden to through traffic at the northern end. Here Messrs. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (which included a very notable man, Mr. Philip Webb, the architect) began their practical protest against prevailing modes and methods of domestic decoration and furniture, which had fallen since the great exhibition of 1851 chiefly under the influence of the Second Empire taste in upholstery, which was the antithesis of the new English movement. This represented in the main a revival of the mediæval spirit

(not the letter) in design; a return to simplicity, to sincerity; to good materials and sound workmanship; to rich and suggestive surface decoration, and simple constructive forms.

The simple, blackframed, old English Buckinghamshire elbowchair, with its rush-bottomed seat, was substituted for the wavybacked and curly legged stuffed chair of the period, with its French polish and concealed, and often very unreliable, construction. Bordered Eastern rugs, and fringed Axminster carpets, on plain or stained boards, or India matting, took the place of the stuffy planned carpet; rich, or simple, flat patterns acknowledged the wall, and expressed the proportions of the room, instead of trying to hide both under bunches of sketchy roses and vertical stripes; while, instead of the big plate-glass

mirror, with ormolu frame, which had long reigned over the cold white marble mantelpiece, small bevelled glasses were inserted in the panelling of the high wood mantelshelf, or hung over it in convex circular form. Slender black wood or light brass curtain-rods, and curtains to match the coverings, or carry out the color of the room, displaced the heavy mahogany and ormolu battering-rams, with their fringed and festooned upholstery, which had hitherto overshadowed the window of the socalled comfortable classes. Plain white or green paint for interior wood-work drove graining and marbleing to the publichouse; blue and white Nankin, Delft, or Grès de Flandres routed Dresden and Sèvres from the cabinet; plain oaken boards and trestles were preferred before

Pages from the Illuminated Manuscript Copy of the
By permission, from the original in

the heavy mahogany telescopic British
dining-table of the mid-nineteenth century;
and the deep, high backed, canopied settle
with loose cushions ousted the castored
and padded couch from the fireside.

Such were the principal ways, as to outward form, in which the new artistic movement made itself felt in domestic decoration. Beginning with the houses of a comparatively limited circle, mostly artists, the taste rapidly spread, and in a few years Morrisian patterns and furniture became the vogue. Cheap imitation on all sides set in, and commercial and fantastic persons, perceiving the set of the current, floated themselves upon it, tricked themselves out like jackdaws with peacocks' feathers, and called it "the æsthetic movement." The usual excesses were indulged