Chapter XI: The Jameson Raid (2)

“_29th May._—The Morrises have been here at Newbuildings since Tuesday. He, poor man, very feeble and aged. I fear from the look of things that it is some form of consumption, and that he will not recover. But his spirits are fairly good, and he talks at times as brilliantly as ever. The new piece of tapestry he has made me, Botticelli’s Spring, is up and is very decorative and brilliant in the drawing-room, though the faces are hardly as good as they ought to be. It has been a great difficulty to execute it, he says, and has turned out better than he expected. We think the three figures with the flowers are March, April, and May. We have had many interesting talks on art, politics, and religion. As to the last he does not believe in any God the Creator of the World, or any Providence, or, I think, any future life. But he is not a pessimist, and thinks mankind the ‘crown of things,’ in spite of man’s destructive action and his modern craze of ugliness. His illness does not make him gloomy; only it troubles him in his work.

“Swinburne’s new poem was reviewed yesterday in all the papers. Morris thinks it poor stuff and not worth doing, as the story, ‘Balin and Balan,’ was quite perfect in its prose form in the ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ ‘It would not do, however,’ he said, ‘for Swinburne to hear me saying this, for he would never forgive me.’ Swinburne, it appears, is the most sensitive and jealous of men, and cannot bear the smallest criticism. But he and Morris have not met for some years, though Mrs. Morris goes now and then to see Swinburne. Tennyson, Morris says, was the same, and never forgave him and Burne-Jones for having disapproved of his bowdlerization of the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ in the ‘Idylls of the King.’ I drove Morris yesterday to Crookhorn and a little way round. He is, I think, happy here. The oak woods are new to him, though he was born in Epping Forest, and he likes the multitude of birds. He creeps about a little among them in the sun.

“_31st May (Sunday)._—The Morrises left yesterday. I think he enjoyed himself while he was here, and he talks of coming back for another week later, and of our making a drive together in Epping Forest, where he was born. But I fear he is very ill. He has told me something of his origin. His father was a bill broker in the City, and he himself was destined for that trade. ‘If I had gone on with it,’ he said, ‘I should have broken the bills into very small bits. We had some mining shares in Cornwall, and when I succeeded to them I sold them. My relations thought me both wicked and mad, but the shares are worth nothing now.’ I took him yesterday to see Shipley Church, a fine old Norman tower, injured with restoration. He was very indignant, swearing at the parsons as we walked up the nave: ‘Beasts! Pigs! Damn their souls!’ We had a long discussion whether the love of beauty was natural or acquired. ‘As for me,’ he said, ‘I have it naturally, for neither my father, nor my mother, nor any of my relations had the least idea of it. I remember as a boy going into Canterbury Cathedral and thinking that the gates of heaven had been opened to me, also when I first saw an illuminated manuscript. These first pleasures which I discovered for myself were stronger than anything else I have had in life.’ He talked much about his Iceland journey, as he often does, and has a sick man’s fancy to go there again, for it would do him good. ‘I am a man of the North,’ he said. ‘I am disappointed at the fine weather we are having here. I had hoped it would rain, so that I could sit indoors and watch it beating on the windows.’

“_1st June._—Went up to London to take Anne to a Geographical meeting, where Theodore Bent gave some account of his travels south of where we were last winter. Like all our geographers nowadays he is an arch Jingo, and talked of opening up the country by gold digging as if it would be a work of piety. The Geographical Society has lent itself to this sort of thing in Africa for the last thirty years.

“_2nd June._—To lunch with Judith at Margot’s; a great treat. Margot was delightful and most amusing. We found her with Lady Greville, who had come to interview her, on the subject of women cross country riders, for some magazine. Margot was splendid in her description of the various styles of riding, and of the falls and smashes she had had and witnessed. ‘There are only three women,’ she said, ‘who really have the nerve to ride a line of their own, and I am one of them.’ Her baby of last year has in no way spoilt her nerve, and she had seventy days’ hunting during the past winter. Two of her step-children were with her at luncheon, and the governess, which gave her a somewhat matronly appearance, but she is otherwise unchanged from the days of her hoyden maidenhood—affectionate, and nice, and cleverer than any one else, with a pretty colour in her cheeks, but very thin. ‘I have lost two stone,’ she said, ‘since you were with me at the Glen. I only weigh 7 stone 6, but I like to ride big horses. The best I ever had was 16.2.

“_3rd June._—Newbuildings. I have sent the following to Morley:

‘As the debate on the Soudan campaign is coming on I write a line to say that I think you will find the action of the Italian Government explainable on the supposition put forward in my article in the “Nineteenth Century” of May, viz., that the arrangement made with the German Emperor was due not to the Italian Government, but to the King of Italy personally through his appealing to the Emperor. The Italian Government, and especially the Duke of Sermoneta, whom I know well, are or were when they came into office opposed altogether to the Italian Colonial policy. The Duke’s hobby (if one may call it so) is financial economy, and he would have liked to see the whole of Erythrya with Kassala, and even Massówah, given up. I am sure, therefore, that it has been the King’s influence that has been at work overruling that of his Ministers. The Italian Government’s object now, I imagine, is to get their expenses in Erythrya, or at any rate at Kassala, paid for by the Egyptian Government or ours, on the plea that they have been _pacifying_ the country in Egyptian interests. It is all nonsense of course, but our Government, by inviting the Italians twelve years ago to take Massówah, has put itself under some obligations to Italy, which will be made the most of.

‘P.S. I am convinced that the whole of this business was worked in the first instance by Royal personages, including our own, much more than by the various F.O’s.’[17]

“_8th June._—There is news of a ‘victory’ in the Soudan at Ferkeh, come, however, just too late to serve as an answer by the Government in Parliament. Labouchere rushed this debate on Friday, and it came off most successfully, whereas the battle, which I have little doubt was fought by order from Downing Street, was only fought on Sunday.

“Coming up to London in the morning I stopped at 90, Sloane Street, to see Frank Lascelles. We had some talk about Egypt and the Soudan, and he admitted to me that there had been a conversation between him and the Emperor William, such as I allude to in my ‘Nineteenth Century’ article. But he professed ignorance as to the real reasons of the decision come to, to advance to Dongola, also surprise at its having been made.

“_10th June._—Mrs. Morris writes that Morris is less well, losing weight daily and growing weaker. But the doctors will have it that it is nervous exhaustion only, and recommend a sea voyage and rest. I do not believe them. She is to take rooms for him at Folkestone meanwhile, a sad prospect.

“_13th June._—My good friend, J. H. Middleton, is dead.[18]

“_15th June._—An inquest has been held on poor Middleton. The jury have returned a verdict of ‘death from misadventure.’ What is curious is that it now appears that for twenty years he has been a morphia taker, and his long illness has been entirely due to that cause. I have so often talked over with him his friend Rossetti’s death from chloral, which he used to deplore! He is a great loss, or rather, one should say, has been a great loss, for he has been dead to the world and to his friends for something like two years.

“Margot came to dinner with George Wyndham and Harry Cust, a merry _parti de quatre_, and George stayed on talking with me after the others were gone.

“_16th June._—Lunched with Philip Currie and his wife, just back from Constantinople. There seems little chance now of their being transferred to Paris. Afterwards to Lady Galloway’s.

“_24th June._—Yesterday to Folkestone to the Morrises. He is distinctly better, and I hope may yet come round, as the doctors declare he will. He talked a great deal about his boyhood, said he had read the whole of Scott’s novels before he was seven, and had gone through the phase of ‘Marmion’ and the ‘Lady of the Lake.’ At his school, Marlborough, he was neither high nor low in his form, but always last in arithmetic [in this like me]; hated Cicero and Latin generally, but anything in the way of history had attracted him; he knew English history better than Greek history, though only the latter was taught; he had learned nearly everything he knew of architecture and mediæval things running about the country round Marlborough as a schoolboy. The Morrises are at the Norfolk Hotel.

“_26th June._—With Everard Fielding to see Tissot’s pictures, not really good either in drawing or in taste, and rather sham in their Oriental realism.

“Breakfasted with George, who was in the highest of his high spirits, having been up at a ball till five at Grosvenor House, and then out at nine to try a new bicycle on Hampstead Heath, which is to run forty miles an hour. His triumphs are my triumphs, and I delight in his happiness.

“_1st July._—Lunched with Harry Cust, who is starting in a few days for South Africa.

“_10th July._—Went with George Wyndham to a dinner given by Henley to the ‘New Review’ contributors, a deadly dull affair, as all men’s dinners are—the most interesting person I met there was the Dane Brandes, who has the honour of having invented Ibsen. Whibley also was there, with whom I talked.

“Things are going badly in South Africa for the Chartered Company. The black are in arms, and it seems doubtful whether they can be put down. Rhodes is now quite discredited.

“_11th July._—Lunched with Lady Galloway, and down by the afternoon train to Canterbury to stay with Guy Wyndham and his wife, who are quartered there. They have a very beautiful child, a boy called George.

“_12th July._—With Guy to see the Cathedral. I am disappointed with it, after all Morris told me—that is, with the inside, which has been scraped out of most of its interest. Only the tombs are splendid, especially that of the Black Prince. The tower outside, seen from the cloisters, is grand, and I have arrived just in time to see these and the chapter house unspoiled. ‘If you had come a week later,’ said the verger, ‘you would have found the whole a mass of scaffolding.’ Dean Farrar, who wants, Morris says, to be made a Bishop, is bent on scraping and destroying all that has hitherto escaped, a hideous madness of destruction nothing can prevent.

“In the evening back to London, and dined with the Morrises, to wish him good-bye, as he sails for Norway next week. The garden at Kelmscott House is lovely with hollyhocks.

“_15th July._—To the Horse Show at the Crystal Palace, where Mesaoud has taken first Arab Prize, Meijliss second. This is satisfactory, though in truth no great triumph, seeing what a poor competition it was.

“_17th July._—Went to see Bowles and consult him about Egyptian affairs, and as to bringing forward the case of Rhodes’ 220 Soudanese, which certainly ought to be done. Bowles has made for himself by his cleverness a certain position in the House of Commons, and I would rather he took the case up than the Radicals.

“_18th July._—I have written to the ‘Times’ about Cecil Rhodes and his 220 Soudanese recruited at Cairo, and never since heard of.

“In the afternoon I started for Blackdown, going by way of Petworth, where I left cards, nobody being at home. Then on by Lodsworth Common. This is, I think, the easiest, though the longest road, and may be about twenty-one miles. I found Harrison at cricket with his boys, now grown- up young men, but they came in presently, and I played a set of lawn tennis with the philosopher, and spent a pleasant evening discussing his creed of Humanity and mine of anti-Humanity. It seems to be pretty much the same thing as far as politics are concerned, for the principal wish of both of us is to see the break-up of the British Empire. He has some right to believe in Humanity, as he has never had a pain or ache or a sleepless night in his life, and he is past sixty. Thus in half serious humour we passed the evening. There is nobody in the world less like a philosopher or a religious leader than the good Harrison.

“_19th July (Sunday)._—Off at five in the morning, having said good-bye overnight, going by Lodsworth and Ebenhoe, Kirdford and Wisborough Green, an old-fashioned bit of country as any in Sussex, belonging, I think, all to Leconfield. Long may it so remain.

“_3rd Aug._—Dr. Jameson has been sentenced to fifteen months imprisonment, a sentence at once too much and too little. The Government has made him a first-class misdemeanant, so as a punishment it is very little. At the same time if the sentence had been carried out it would have been a savage one. He ought to have been hanged at Pretoria. The ‘Times’ has refused to publish my letter about Rhodes’ Soudanese.

“_6th Aug._—There has been heavy cholera up the Nile. Captain Fenwick dead, and one of the young engineer officers I saw at Korosko last November. He was under twenty-four, and was receiving £1,000 a year from the Egyptian Government, and thought himself a lucky fellow to be there. They are to advance on Dongola at the end of the month. What our Jingoes want is to wait till the Egyptian army is exhausted by heat, hard fighting, and cholera, and then to send an English army to Khartoum in cool weather to reap the profits of the campaign in English interests. This is being advocated unblushingly in the ‘Pall Mall’ and elsewhere. I wrote to expose the scandalous intention, but they would not print my letter.

“_10th Aug._—Started on a driving tour in the New Forest, stopping the first day for luncheon at Lavington with Reginald Wilberforce and his family. I have known Reginald all my life, that is to say, from the year 1845, when we lived for a while at Alverstoke after my father’s death, and when his father, the Rev. Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, was Rector of the parish. There were three boys then—Reginald, at that time called Garton; Ernest, now Bishop of Chichester; and Basil, Chaplain of the House of Commons. They were all three as bad boys as could be wished, and my mother nicknamed them ‘the sons of Eli.’ Ernest, with whom I was in the same class at school, an especially wicked boy, which is saying a good deal, but now just as justly respected, and a Right Reverend Father in God. The only good boy of the family was an older brother Herbert, but he had died at sea, while the wicked ones lived on to adorn the Church of England with their virtues. Thus is the child father to the man. I went over the little parish church after luncheon with Reginald, who is an amusing talker.

He showed me the grave of his Aunt Caroline, who had been Cardinal Manning’s wife. It remains without inscription of any kind. The old Cardinal visited it in 1876 and talked of putting up a stone, but he was probably perplexed as to the wording of the inscription. ‘Wife of Cardinal Manning’ would have looked strange. Reginald, however, thinks now of doing this, and suggests ‘Wife of Henry Edward, afterwards Cardinal Manning.’ Reginald told me much else that was interesting about Cardinal Manning’s visit. He had come down for the consecration of the Catholic church at Burton Park, and asked to be allowed to lunch at Lavington, so they entertained him there, and he saw all the old parishioners and was much affected. Afterwards he walked to the top of the down with Reginald and discoursed to him about his soul, exhorting him to conversion—thus for two hours. Their last words were: ‘Think, my dear Reginald, if God should require your soul of you to-night, where should you be?’ To which Reginald, ‘Why, my dear Uncle Henry, I should be in the hands of God.’ As his Eminence was leaving, the parishioners all came to wish him good-bye, and he blessed them each in turn. When Reginald had put his uncle into the carriage, he said: ‘And is there no blessing, no little blessing for me?’ They never met again, and ‘he never cared for me after this,’ Reginald said, ‘though he used to see my wife and children and was always most affectionate to them.’ He tells me the way Purcell, his biographer, got hold of the Cardinal’s diaries and letters was this. He had had several conversations with Manning on the subject of his biography, and Manning had given him some sort of verbal promise about it and had shown him where his diaries were kept, and one day he came to the house when the Cardinal was out and persuaded the servant to let him have them, saying that the Cardinal had told him to call and take them away, he knew where they were, and had authority, etc. But it was a pure theft and Manning had begun legal proceedings for their recovery when he died.”

I went on the same afternoon and camped on Goodwood Down, and on the next day through Chichester to Fareham and Southampton, and camped again in the evening at the edge of the New Forest, the immediate object of my journey being to pay Auberon Herbert a visit at Oldhouse. Of this I write:

“_12th Aug._—Oldhouse lies pretty well in the heart of the Forest. One descends to it from the high road by a grass track of a mile and a half. It is a freehold of half-a-dozen acres, recently purchased by Auberon of its owner, and there he has made his hermitage. The old cottage he has pulled down and in its place has built up a number of cheap buildings of brick and wood devoid of architecture. Fortunately they lie in a hollow and so are invisible until one is close by. Auberon has done so much for the Forest, and fought so many battles to preserve it from the Crown officers, that he must be forgiven this one lapse. I found him with Stafford Howard, the Crown Commissioner, and Esdale, a local squire and verderer of the Forest, Auberon’s ally in the Forest battle. I had much talk with them about this. The chief difficulty is what to do with the great fir enclosures, the firs ought to be cut down, but there is nobody to buy them, and an ugly growth of them is creeping over the open spaces, self-sown. It ought to be put a stop to, or in fifty years’ time the Forest will be like Woking cemetery.

“Auberon is much aged since I saw him last, and more flighty than he used to be. He is beset with a double mania, a craving for fresh air and in contradiction a terror of draughts, so that he is always shifting from in to out of doors and putting on or taking off extra clothing. His two children, Bron and Nan, wait on him with angelic devotion. They do all the work of the house. When I arrived Nan was in the kitchen up to her elbows in flour, making bread. She is a great strong girl of sixteen, the picture of health, with limbs like a boy’s, great honest grey eyes, good complexion, and good teeth. Auberon and I have talked a great deal on politics, Eastern and Western, he, as his way is, asking innumerable questions. We agree on most subjects, but he is too tender to his countrymen’s sins, excusing them and comparing them favourably with the French. He has become an entire vegetarian, as is his daughter, and for the most part his son. Their way of life is the most uncomfortable imaginable. They have no fixed hours for meals, or for getting up in the morning, or for going to bed. The first regular meal is said to be at half-past two in the afternoon, and there is another at twilight in the evening, but they do not sit down to either meal. Auberon sits in a summer house during part of his meal, while the children run in and out, and he has constantly to get up to arrange and re-arrange his clothing, which is of Shetland wool shawls and jerseys, and the children are called to put up and take down wooden screens on this side and that as the wind may seem to blow or not to blow. Nan, with inexhaustible patience, humours and serves her father, and Bron is almost equally good to him. This is the best tribute that can be paid to Auberon’s system of education, but it is clear there must be a breaking point somewhere. I don’t know which child to admire the most, the boy or the girl.

“_13th Aug._—Spent the morning alone writing, for Auberon has his occupations. He is a wonderful man, with a certain ethereal beauty of the Shelley kind, which has increased with years. His theories are, I believe, essentially true, and he is true to them in practice, but without his children it would be a desolate, impossible life. He took me for a walk at luncheon time, discoursing as he went, his daughter following, us, all ears for our talk. She is very nice and pleasant, as girls of sixteen always are, still wearing short petticoats, and with hair cut short, enthusiastic at the thought of going, perhaps this winter, to Egypt.

“_14th Aug._—On by Ringwood and up the Avon valley to Salisbury, where we baited at the White Hart, an excellent inn, but vitiated by a German waiter. I went over the Cathedral, which has been scraped inside and garnished from end to end. In another hundred years it may perhaps tone down again to beauty, but at present the black pillar stems, newly polished, have the effect of so many tall stove pipes. It was infinitely finer under the old whitewash, but the deans will have their way. Then on to Wilton and George Pembroke’s grave. The house is shut up, as Sidney finds himself too poor to live in it, and the days of their joyous youth are a vanished dream. Then on across the Down through Groveley Wood, the biggest mere wood in England, where I remember riding with Pembroke and his brothers and sisters thirty years ago, when they were children, playing a game of Puss in the Corner, with wild galloping down the rides. There at nightfall I camped.

“_15th Aug._—Another short morning’s drive brought us to Stockton where I spent the Sunday with my cousins Pamela and Eddy Tennant.

“George has been appointed to the South African Committee, and is to sail for the Cape to-day.”

From Stockton I went on through Warminster and Longleat Park to Mells. “Longleat is very fine approached from this side, but the house disappointed me. It is very perfect, too perfect, and, large as it is, it is lost in the size of the park. What makes it look dull is the uniform plate-glass which has been put in every window. It is astonishing how this destroys the beauty of old buildings. It is as though the eyes in a beautiful face had been put out and replaced with spectacles. I prefer Mells, where I now am, a really fascinating little place, a comfortable eighteenth-century house, remote and shut in, which gives a sense of immemorial quiet screened from the world’s view. I arrived late at half-past seven, but they had not yet gone to dress for dinner, and presently out rushed the whole family. Mrs. Horner, with her children, very pretty ones, and Godfrey Webb, who is staying there, and Horner, who went out to help me choose a camping place, and invited me in to dinner. I was not expected, but travelling in this way calls out the latent hospitality of the countryside almost as much as if one were in the East, and Horner gave himself endless trouble about my road to Wells next morning.

“_17th Aug._—My day’s drive to-day was along the Mendip Hills to Wells, where I baited the horses at the Swan Inn, near the Cathedral. Wells Cathedral is the most perfect in England. The inside has been scraped, but not much spoiled, while the outside is quite intact. Its surroundings are unique—the Bishop’s palace, the famous wells in the Episcopal garden, and the moat. While in the Cathedral I got shut in behind the choir, and sat on a stone bench listening, not unedified, to the chaunting of a service. It is an interesting thing to have witnessed, as I have, from its beginning, the revival of the Church of England, which fifty years ago seemed almost dead. In those days a Cathedral like this was left almost without ceremonial from Sunday to Sunday, and the officiating canon, if he read the church service to his clerk, would begin with ‘Dearly beloved brother,’ for want of other congregation. Now all is elaborately ordered, yet I confess I like the old godless way best, it was more honest and marked the fact, which was a fact, that the continuity of church worship had been broken at the Reformation. Now all is sham mediævalism, sham seventeenth century, sham eighteenth century. We shall get back presently, I hope, to our pews on eclectic principles, and a new Georgian era of ecclesiastical wigs and gowns. Then I ran down by train to Glastonbury and back, and camped for the night in a beautiful coombe belonging to a Mr. Tudway, a local banker to whom Horner had given me a letter, dining with him in a beautiful Georgian house belonging to his family since 1760. Here my driving journey ended, for we were overtaken with heavy rains.

“_30th Aug._—We have had three public events during the week, first Cecil Rhodes has patched up a peace with the Matabeles, heralded in all the daily papers as an heroic act of courage, because he went personally to the Matabele camp to treat. Secondly, our gallant fleet has bombarded Zanzibar. The Sultan had died suddenly, and Khalid, one of his relations, son of the former Sultan Bargash, had seized the throne and got the native soldiery to join him. These held the palace against the fleet, which bombarded them from close quarters, killed five hundred of them, and burnt out the remainder. Our papers are again exultant, and raise a cry for annexation on the plea for abolishing slavery in Zanzibar. Yet I remember fifteen years ago Sultan Bargash applying to me to get the Indian Government to allow him coolie labour as a substitute for the slaves. Zanzibar was a model Arab State, a hundred times more liberal in its ideas than the Government of India, which would not hear of helping the Sultan. I know this, having brought the case before Lytton. Thirdly, there has been a new great slaying of Armenians at Constantinople, the companion of what took place last year, but on a larger scale. It was begun, as in the first instance, by the Armenian Committee, which seized the Ottoman bank and threw bombs into the street, their object being to force on a crisis. To this the Moslems retorted with a massacre.

“_2nd Sept._—The Nile expedition has been stopped by floods, great _seyls_ from the hills, which have swept away the new railway just as they have finished it. The talk is now of having hardly time to get to Dongola before the river goes down. If the expedition fails, all I have said about the abdication of Providence has been blasphemy. The good Egyptian troops have been worn out by hard work in a thankless labour. They are said now to be ‘tired.’ Broadwood wrote me this some time ago.

“_3rd Sept._—To Wotton to dine and sleep. The good old Evelyn is packing up his trunks to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Next day to London to see Morris, whom the doctors now declare to be in a pulmonary consumption. Mrs. de Morgan was there and Cockerell, and while I was sitting with them in came Madeline Wyndham, beautiful in her old age. She took me away with her to see some enamel work she is learning to do at the studio of one Fisher, and I was shown all the process of mixing the colours, ground glass with water, arranging them on a silver plate and burning them on a small oven. Fisher has done a beautiful triptych of a Crucifixion, and a very pretty classic bit called ‘Love’s Chase,’ but the best thing there was one of Madeline’s own, two peacocks.

“_8th Sept._—Started on a series of visits to Scotland, and, on my way north, I find the following:

“_12th Sept._—Met Lord Loch in the train, and had much interesting talk with him on South African affairs and the intrigues of Germany. He told me that when he was at Pretoria some of the Boers explained these to him. Also that the opposition of Germany in South Africa dated from 1886, when Bismarck began it, as against the Empress Frederick. We also discussed the possible deposition of the Sultan. He thought this could only be done by Russia, as our fleet could not get through the Dardanelles without heavy loss.”

While in one of the country houses I found in an anonymous book, dated 1722, the following admirable epitaph of a Duke of Buckingham, which I cannot help transcribing here, so suitable is it for the agnosticisms of our day.

“Pro rege sæpe, pro Republica semper.

Dubius sed non improbus vixi.

Incertus morior sed inturbatus.

Humanum est errare et nescire.

Christum adveneror. Deo confido,

Omnipotenti benevolentissimo.

Ens entium, miserere mei.”

Often for the King, always for the Commonweal.

Doubting but not wickedly have I lived.

I die uncertain but unperturbed.

It is human to err and not to know.

I venerate Christ. I trust in God

The omnipotent the most kind

Being of beings, have pity on me!

Back to London, where we found “great preparations being made for the Emperor and Empress of Russia, who are being fêted in the middle of an agitation against Russian policy at Constantinople. All our English world has gone mad with self-righteousness.

“_26th Sept._—Gladstone has fired off his powder against the Sultan at Liverpool, but there was no shot in his Armenian gun. All he can think of as a means of coercion at Constantinople is to break off diplomatic relations, summon the Sultan to take action of some kind and go no further. It is too foolish. All the time he was in office the old man lifted not so much as a finger for the Armenians, and now that he cannot help them he would play their champion against Abdul Hamid, who owes the strength of his position mainly to English diplomacy, as he should remember. In 1882 Gladstone called on Abdul Hamid to help him to put down liberty in Egypt by proclaiming Arabi a rebel and, as he explained to an Indian Mohammedan deputation at the time of Tel-el-Kebir, sent troops to Egypt ‘to establish the Sultan’s rights there.’ In all this he made the Sultan his accomplice against the liberal Mohammedan party, and by doing so set Islamic patriotism on reactionary lines and gave the Sultan his present triumph over his reforming enemies. If liberal Islam is powerless to-day in the Sultan’s grasp it is distinctly Gladstone who has made it so, yet now he comes forward shocked at the result. I should like to write these things, but who would listen?

“_28th Sept._—Dined with the Morrises. He came in like a man risen from the grave, and sat a few minutes at the table, but seemed dazed and unable to follow the conversation. Miss de Morgan was there, and his wife waiting on him, and a young man who had charitably come in to sit up with him at night. He seemed absorbed in his misery.

“_4th Oct. (Sunday)._—Morris is dead. I got a letter telling it from Lady Burne-Jones this morning. She says, ‘Our dear friend Morris died at twenty minutes past eleven this morning, as quietly as ever a babe went to sleep in its mother’s arms.’

“It has come sooner than I expected, though I knew his case was hopeless. It is better as it is. He is the most wonderful man I have known, unique in this, that he had no thought for anything or person, including himself, but only for the work he had in hand. He was not selfish in the sense of seeking his own advantage or pleasure or comfort, but he was too absorbed in his own thoughts to be either openly affectionate or actively kind. I suppose he had a real affection for Burne-Jones, they saw each other constantly and spent their Sunday mornings, always together, and I have seen him tender to his daughter Jenny and nice with her and with his wife, but I doubt if he thought of them much when he did not see them, and his life was not arranged in reference to them. To the rest of the world he seemed quite indifferent, and he never, I am sure, returned the affection I gave him. He liked to talk to me because I knew how to talk to him, and our fence of words furbished his wit, but I doubt if he would have crossed the street to speak to me. He was generous and open-handed in his dealings, and I fancy did many kindnesses in a money way for people in distress, but he fashed himself for no man and no woman. The truth is he would not give an hour of his _time_ to anyone, he held it to be too valuable. Thus, while all the world admired and respected him, I doubt whether he had many friends; they got too little in return to continue their affection. I should say half-a-dozen were all the friends he had. I do not count myself among the number, intimate as I was with him and much as I loved him. It will be a great grief for Jenny, a great break-up for Janey, and a great loss for the world at large, for he was really our greatest man.

“_5th Oct._—I came up to London to see if I could be of any use at Kelmscott House, and first I called on Burne-Jones and had luncheon with him and his son. He said that his interest in life had come to an end with Morris, as all their ideas and plans and work had been together all their lives. Phil, with whom I had a private talk, gave me curiously enough the exact same impression of Morris as that which I wrote in this diary yesterday. His impersonality, his lack of personal affection for anyone except, perhaps, for his, Phil’s, father. Then I went on to Hammersmith. The coffin, a very plain box, lay in the little room downstairs, with a beautiful old embroidered cloth over it and a small wreath of leaves and sad-coloured flowers. It was the room which was his bedroom, and where he died, with his best and favourite books around him. The morning after the day I dined with him, Tuesday, was a fine one and he was taken out for an airing in his chair, and he enjoyed it thoroughly and said he felt well. On coming in he insisted on going upstairs, but the exertion was too much; he broke a blood vessel and lay after that for the most part insensible till he died on Saturday.

“_8th Oct._—Rosebery has resigned his leadership of the Liberal party. I wrote at once to Loulou Harcourt to congratulate his father.

“_15th Oct._—I am leaving home this afternoon for Egypt, stopping as usual for three nights at Gros Bois on my way. Jusserand and his wife there, and Giovanni Borghese and young Norton, Mrs. Norton’s grandson, now at the Paris Embassy.”