little more than a "yearning nostalgia or a sweet complaint" and that Morris became "a realist and a revolutionary" only when he adopted socialism in 1882. Mackail was of the opinion that Morris had an "innate Socialism" which had "penetrated and dominated all he did" throughout his life. Given the conflict between his personal and professional life and his socio-political views, MacCarthy described Morris as "a conservative radical". Morris's behaviour was often erratic. He was of a nervous disposition, and throughout his life relied on networks of male friends to aid him in dealing with this. Morris's friends nicknamed him "Topsy" after a character in Uncle Tom's Cabin. He had a wild temper and when sufficiently enraged could suffer seizures and blackouts. Rossetti was known to taunt Morris to enrage him for the amusement of himself and their other friends. Biographer Fiona MacCarthy suggests that Morris might have suffered from a form of Tourette's syndrome as he exhibited some of the symptoms. In later life he suffered from gout, a common complaint among middle-class males in the Victorian period. Morris's ethos was that one should "have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." He also held to the view that "No work which cannot be done with pleasure in the doing is worth doing" and adopted as his motto "As I can" from the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. Work Literature William Morris was a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, essays, and translations of ancient and medieval texts. His first poems were published when he was 24 years old, and he was polishing his final novel, The Sundering Flood, at the time of his death. His daughter May's edition of Morris's Collected Works (1910–1915) runs to 24 volumes, and two more were published in 1936. Morris began publishing poetry and short stories in 1856 through The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which he founded with his friends and financed while at university. His first volume, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), was the first book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry to be published. The dark poems, set in a sombre world of violence, were coolly received by the critics, and he was discouraged from publishing more for a number of years. "The Haystack in the Floods", one of the poems in that collection, is probably now one of his better-known