They came at an unfortunate moment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it proper to be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and when some at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had left their first faith in poetry or poetic prose.

There was, moreover, perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisian condemnation, of the "Wardour Street" dialect.

Yet there was no sham in them: it was impossible for Mr.Morris to have anything to do with shams--even his socialism was not that--and they were in reality a revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put a little of the nineteenth century into them.

The best--probably the best of all is _The Well at the World's End_ (1896)--have an extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by no means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come.

But for the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not comprehended or enjoyed thereby.