GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
things, we owe the movement to preserve, rather than to restore, 
old buildings. 
In 1877 the idea materialized into the ‘‘ Society for the Pro- 
tection of Ancient Buildings,” popularly known as “ The Anti- 
Scrape,” a word of Morris’s own coinage. From that time it did, 
quietly and unostentatiously, much work of inestimable value, 
counting among its working members many enthusiastic and 
promising young architects—-keen to protect the “sacred monu- 
ments,” as Morris deemed them, of “the nation’s growth and 
hope.” Some of these were among the first to answer the call to 
the colours, and crossing the Channel at the beginning of the 
European War in August, 1914, they had the exquisite pain of 
witnessing, with their own eyes, the ruthless and wanton destruction 
in Belgium and France, of many of the noblest memorials of mediz- 
val architectural genius. But their work at home has merely 
been postponed, for I feel sure that ‘“‘ The Anti-Scrape ” has 
still a future before it in the happy day, so certainly coming, 
when the arts of peace shall emerge from the horrid welter of 
war. 
But above and beyond aught else, William Morris was a great 
and original genius in all the arts that are decoratively applicative 
to domestic life. 
Poet, dreamer, social reformer—all this he was—but as Mr. 
Mackail well says, speaking at the moment of his poetry—‘‘ the 
faculty of design in its highest form was the quality in which 
Morris’s unique strength lay,’ and the remark is even more ap- 
plicable to his art than to his verse. 
I do not think with Mr. Clutton-Brock, the author of a charming 
monograph on “ William Morris’s Work and Influence,” that the 
latter made itself widely felt on the Continent. Though he 
passionately admired the French Gothic (the first intense pleasure 
of his life was his introduction to Rouen Cathedral), yet he himself 
was essentially English in all he thought and did, and the almost 
severe simplicity of effect at which he aimed in much of the work 
he produced, was alien to the genius and sentiment of the Latin 
races: it certainly was entirely opposed, in its orderly restraint, 
to the prevailing taste of Germany, as shown in the heavy, florid, 
rococo decoration that I remember to have hated a dozen years 
ago in Berlin, and elsewhere. , 
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