Design for ornamented verse with birds and brambles

This design for ornamented verse features a design of branches, leaves, berries and birds surrounding a pencil text inscription. The inscription is an embellished translation from Marcus Aurelius’s ‘Meditations’ 4.1 , it reads: ‘We are fellow citizens and share a common citizenship and the world is as it were a city so is a nation but a type of the world a town its pattern & the village its miniature.

Aurelius was a writer the Century Guild admired, his work was revived in 1891 by Herbert Horne for an edition of their quarterly publication, The Hobby Horse.