The World of Romance

In the tales . . . the world is one of pure romance. Medi?val customs, medi?val buildings, the medi?val Catholic religion, the general social framework of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, are assumed throughout, but it would be idle to attempt to place them in any known age or country . . . Their author in later years thought, or seemed to think, lightly of them, calling them crude (as they are) and very young (as they are).

But they are nevertheless comparable in quality to Keats’s ‘Endymion’ as rich in imagination, as irregularly gorgeous in language, as full in every vein and fibre of the sweet juices and ferment of the spring. —J. W. Mackail

In his last year at Oxford, Morris established, assuming the entire financial responsibility, the ‘Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,’ written almost entirely by himself and his college friends, but also numbering Rossetti among its contributors. Like most college ventures, its career was short, ending with its twelfth issue in December, 1856. In this magazine Morris first found his strength as a writer, and though his subsequent literary achievements made him indifferent to this earlier work, its virility and wealth of romantic imagination justify its rescue from oblivion.

The article on Amiens, intended originally as the first of a series, is included in this volume as an illustration of Morris’s power to clothe things actual with the glamour of Romance.