KELMSCOTT PRESS: MORRIS, William (trans.).

£15,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane. First edition translated by William Morris, presentation copy, inscribed to his old friend on the first blank, a few weeks after publication, "To A. C. Swinburne from William Morris. Jan. 19th, 1894".Swinburne replied by letter, "Many thanks for your beautiful little book, which I read through last night at a sitting with much interest and enjoyment. There never was such a type as yours - one could read Longfellow or Tupper in such type".Morris and Swinburne first met in Oxford in July 1857, when Morris was working on the murals in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union alongside Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was a vital time for Morris, both creatively and personally. That year, he also met his future wife, Jane Burden, and submitted to Macmillan the manuscript for his first book of poems, The Defence of Guenevere. Swinburne was then a student at Balliol College; he and Morris quickly began reading each other's writings after discovering their shared enthusiasm for Malory and Arthurian legend. Swinburne's juvenile poem "Queen Yseult" clearly shows the influence of Morris's own "La Belle Iseult", and in a letter to John Nichol, Swinburne remembered how he read his version "one evening to Morris and the others... They all praise the poem far more than I (seriously speaking) believe it deserves. Morris says it is much better than his own poem, which opinion I took the liberty to tell him was absurd" (Lang, I, p.

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