Chapter VI: Francis Thompson (2)

We lunched at that time always in the Jubilee garden, where he was much annoyed by the wasps, which were particularly numerous that summer, even to the extent that on one occasion he cursed them for the drunken brutes they were. He used to appeal to me to help him when they got into his wine. “Will you please kill this wasp for me, I cannot do it, I have never killed anything in my life.” At last one bit him and he had his wrist bound up in lint with a strong solution of ammonia, and going to sleep soon after it raised a blister which remained an interest to him till he died, wearing the rag, as saints are represented carrying the instruments of their martyrdom. It has remained a legend here, but I do not vouch for its authenticity as a miracle, though it is a fact, that for three years after this there were no wasps in the garden. It was on the long wicker sofa, the same that was my brother’s during his last illness, that he was usually laid out to sleep through the afternoon in the New Room on the ground floor where his portrait now hangs.

“_21st Sept._—To London, and lunched with Horace Rumbold, and he talked again about the Crown Prince Rudolph’s death, giving me new details. ‘Rudi Hoyos,’ he said, ‘was a charming man of about fifty, very popular in Vienna. The girl’s mother had been a Baltazzi, married to a diplomatist of the minor nobility almost bourgeois. The girl had been driven in his fiacre from Vienna by a well-known character named Bratfisch, who must have known all about it, but whose mouth remained afterwards for ever absolutely closed. Bratfisch was an amusing personage, a cabdriver, who used to be had in by the young men of fashion to entertain them with his talk, as he knew all the scandalous stories of Vienna. Horace supposes that the girl finding the Prince was dead, and herself so entirely compromised, committed suicide, but either story might be true. Nobody would ever know. The Emperor, Francis Joseph, never allowed the subject to be mentioned before him. He considered it too mean an affair and too great a family disgrace.’

“_22nd Sept._—I am staying for the week end with Rivers Wilson at his country house, Fox Hills, near Chertsey. With us has been Sir Lepel Griffin who has entertained us with many anecdotes of Gladstone and other personages. From Rivers I have received a detailed account of the Mufettish Ismaïl Sadyk’s death at the Khedive Ismaïl’s hands in 1876. Rivers told how some time before it happened, he (Rivers) was coming home one night from seeing the Khedive at his palace at Ghezireh when, passing through the garden, he observed a figure issuing from the shadow of the trees into the moonlight, and a man had seized his arm, crouching to him, and imploring him not to leave Egypt. It was the Mufettish, and Sherif Pasha, who was walking with Rivers, translated what the suppliant said, and explained the situation, for Rivers knew no word of Arabic, and was alarmed, thinking he might be an assassin. The Mufettish’s appeal was very pitiful. When the old man’s arrest became known the American Consul had gone to Ismaïl, and had threatened him with Consular displeasure if anything violent should happen, and the Khedive had become alarmed and sent at once to stop the execution of his orders, but his messenger had been met on the way by another coming from the steamer, who had thrown up his arms and given the news that it was too late. Lepel Griffin, once my adversary on Indian affairs, is a little white-haired rotund personage with some humour in conversation, self- indulgent and cynical as Anglo-Indians often are. An Ulster Irishman by birth he affects an English lisp and drawl, and talks about himself as an Englishman. We have had also here Allen, the Canadian head of the Allen line of steamers, with whom Rivers as head of the Canadian Pacific railroad has business relations, a highly intelligent man.

“Fox Hills is a very beautiful place of which Rivers has a seven years’ lease. The domain was formerly a common, which Charles James Fox planted with Scotch firs, many of which are now splendid trees. There are a number, too, of very large birch trees grown from the stub in a way one seldom sees. The ground is finely tossed about and covered with fern and heath, a sanct solitude in which Rivers lives the life of a rich city man. Several parties of Canadians and Americans arrived from London to spend the afternoon, and talk business with him. Rivers has become emphatically a _beau vieillard_, well dressed, well cared for, alert and pleasant to all. He has what after all is the chief consolation of old age, the sense of having succeeded in life, though he did not succeed in Egypt.

“_28th Sept._—Thompson remains on at Rascall’s Corner, somewhat better in health, but intellectually defunct. His whole interest in the last few days has been his wasp bite, which has been made worse by the ammonia. He has managed, I believe, at last to finish his article for the ‘Athenæum.’ [It was on Sir Thomas Browne.]

“_3rd Oct._—I am much interested in two long letters Father Tyrrell has published in the ‘Times,’ a reply to the Pope’s Encyclical, which will probably bring on him a formal excommunication. I have written to him to express my sympathy, and to tell him that if there had been any exponent of views like his forty-five years ago, it might have made all the difference to me in my spiritual life.

“My niece, Mary Wentworth, has been staying here.

“_16th Oct._—Thompson paid me his farewell visit to-day, Everard Meynell having arrived in the morning to fetch him back to London. We had become alarmed about him latterly, as since the weather began to break up he has remained entirely indoors, shut in David’s cottage with a big fire and doors and windows carefully closed, a bottle of laudanum, David tells me, beside him, and ill with diarrhœa. It has reduced him to a skeleton. Meynell has sent a priest to see him, and I felt that any day he might go suddenly. He needs some one with him who can exercise control over him, but I doubt his living over Christmas. As an intellectual force he is already dead, and his poor body is dying, too.”

My account of Francis Thompson’s visit to Newbuildings needs supplementing on some points. During the first week he lived with Everard Meynell at Gosbrook, a cottage which I had lent to them for the purpose, and they came daily to us for luncheon, and to spend the afternoon at Newbuildings. This was from 24th August until the end of the month. Thompson at that time could walk the distance, a mile there and a mile back, and he spent his afternoons with us as already described out of doors in the Jubilee Garden, and each day, when we had finished luncheon, he would retire to the New Room, carrying with him a glass of wine with which he mixed some white powder, and lying down on the long Madeira sofa, the same which had been my brother’s in his last illness, there remained half asleep during the rest of the afternoon, going back to Gosbrook with Everard in the evening. After Everard’s return to London he moved to David Robert’s cottage, where he was well looked after by David and his wife. At first he continued coming to Newbuildings every day for luncheon, but as he grew weaker I had to send a carriage for him, and then he gradually ceased coming; the incident of the wasps he took very seriously. The last fortnight he was at Rascall’s he gave himself up entirely to taking laudanum, and David and his wife were alarmed at his condition. The drug was sent him by post from London, and I heard that he took as much as six ounces of it daily. The last time he came to see us at Newbuildings he was so weak that he had to be helped back into the carriage.

“Father Tyrrell has written me an interesting letter in answer to mine, in which I had expressed a hope that he would not allow himself to be driven out of his ground, on either side (as a Liberal Catholic or as an obedient member of the Church). He writes: ‘As you may imagine, the air is full of missiles directed at my head, and I am busy dodging them. It is not pleasant, yet to my Irish blood not wholly unpleasant.’ Also, in allusion to what I had said about the influence such teaching as his might have had on me forty-five years ago, ‘Yes, had Knowledge been welcomed earlier, many might have been saved to the Church, but she (Knowledge) has had to force herself in, and the result may be rather destructive for her unwilling hostess, yet the gain of Rome to the cause of reason and humanity would be so great that one is loath to abandon the effort, at all events I can never admit that I am beaten.’

“_20th Oct. (Sunday)._—Rivers Wilson has been here with Neville and Cunninghame Graham and a friend of his from Morocco, one Fernan, an Anglo-Belgian merchant of Casa Blanca, who was there during the recent bombardment by the French. Fernan tells me the bombardment was without sufficient excuse. Trouble had arisen through the opposition of the native Moors to the new harbour works being constructed by a French company, and especially to the appointment of Frenchmen as revenue officers to the Custom House. This had led to excitement, and four or five Europeans had been killed by roughs; arrests, however, had been made by the local authorities, and there was no real danger in the town when the French man-of-war arrived. The commander of the vessel had promised to give three hours’ warning before taking steps, but chose to give it at 2 o’clock in the morning, and began firing at 5, the pretext being that a single rifle shot had been fired on the French landing party. Fernan is a strong partisan of the Moors, or rather against the French. Between the reigning Sultan, Abdul Aziz and Mulai Hafid, he thinks there is not much to choose, but he has only seen the latter once some years ago when he was a provincial Governor. The French, he thinks, are hampered in their projects against Morocco by the difficulty of providing a sufficient army without denuding either France or Algeria of troops.

“Rivers is fierce against Cromer, especially because Cromer, having been his subordinate in Egypt in 1878, has never acknowledged the fact that the work of financial regeneration there was begun while he, Wilson, was head of the financial commission. This is true. Cromer has always ignored every reform in Egypt effected before 1883, the date of his own arrival there as Consul General. Of Riaz Pasha Rivers speaks with affection, and of how Riaz had helped him on the financial commission.

“I have had a correspondence with Malet in the ‘Times’ about the passage in my ‘Secret History,’ where I record that I went to Downing Street to get him ordered, for his safety’s sake, on board ship just before the bombardment of Alexandria. Malet insists that by this I meant I had got him ‘recalled,’ which certainly was not in my mind. The dispute with Malet was of no importance, but the ‘Times’ has taken occasion to vent its spleen or rather Moberly Bell’s spleen against me in a leading article, to which by Rivers’ advice, I have replied, showing Moberly Bell’s part in the affair.

“_30th Oct._—Cromer has made a speech in the City of the most rampant bureaucratic kind, and Grey has refused again to release the Denshawai prisoners.

“_14th Nov._—Broadly called on me in connection with my ‘Times’ pamphlet. Then to Neville’s studio in Chelsea, where I am sitting to him for a portrait in Arab dress, and from that on to lunch with Button at Fulham. I found Button established there in a delightful old house in Church Row called ‘The Hermitage,’ with a large open hall and a garden behind it adjoining the Bishop of London’s garden which he has filled with his marble vases and well-heads brought from Italy, among them some really fine things.

“Button leads a solitary life at Fulham as if in the country, never going into London, and depending chiefly on his clerical neighbours for his society. He took me out after luncheon for a short walk, and passing the churchyard he pointed out to me old Lord Ranelagh’s grave there. On it we were surprised to find some newly-cut flowers, all red ones, laid. This, although the old fellow had been dead for twenty years.

“As I was leaving Chapel Street in the evening to return to Newbuildings a note reached me from Meynell announcing Francis Thompson’s death, and asking me to write a memorial of him in the ‘Academy.’ This I did, and it was so arranged that nothing was known of Thompson’s death till mine and a number more articles about him were ready to print. This accounted in some measure for the sudden interest taken by the public in him as a great poet, one fully deserved, for he was our greatest religious poet since Herbert. He died in a private hospital to which Meynell had taken him a fortnight ago. He saw him there on Tuesday and he died on Wednesday the 13th at dawn.

“_17th Nov. (Sunday)._—Terence Bourke is here. He tells me that in Tunis things are going prosperously now, that the French have adopted a more conciliatory policy towards the Moslem inhabitants and that these are accepting the French _régime_. The French are discontinuing their fortification of Bizerta now that the Anglo-French Entente is signed.

“_24th Dec._—The release of the Denshawai prisoners is announced in the papers, so that episode is over, but it has done more towards shaking the British Empire in the East than anything that has happened for years. It smashed Cromer and it has half smashed Grey. Its sound has gone out into all lands, into India, Persia, and throughout Asia. Egypt it has saved from her long apathy and it will continue to inspire the new Nationalism.

“_1st Jan._, 1908.—Eversley has written me a very important letter confirming my account of the Egyptian doings in 1882. As he was a member of the Government at the time it is of great value, in it he says:

“‘Many thanks for your letter and still more for the copy of the second edition of your book. I have read it carefully with the greatest interest. It is the most complete vindication of your own conduct throughout the whole of the Egyptian business.

“‘I think you have been fully justified in quoting from conversations and letters as you have done. There must come a time when such things may be made public and when the convention as to privacy no longer will hold good. It seems to me that after more than 20 years, during which the British policy has prevailed in Egypt almost without question, and when at length a new phase is arising in that country it is quite legitimate to tell the whole story without reserve.

“‘The objection, however, in any case can only come from those who are entitled (if at all) to complain—such as Malet, Colvin, E. Hamilton, etc., but I do not understand that they have made any complaint. Why then Frederic Harrison should do so on their behalf I do not quite understand. I think you hardly do justice to Mr. Gladstone or appreciate the difficulties of his position—how he was fed with lies from the Foreign Office and other quarters. Would he have been justified in breaking up his Government or in resigning himself sooner than give his consent to sending Wolseley to Egypt? What kind of case could he have made for doing so? All the official information was to the effect that Arabi was at the head of a military insurrection and not of a national movement.

“‘Chamberlain and Dilke were mainly responsible for what was done. I recollect well them boasting in the Lobby of the House of Commons that they had cornered the “old man.” I have also always understood that Lord Granville complained that Dilke played him false in the House of Commons by answering questions in a manner to suit his own policy and not that of his chief.

“‘John Morley was at that time completely under the influence of Chamberlain. The passages you quote from the ‘P. M. G.’ are very discreditable. They must have been supplied by Dilke and Chamberlain. Judging by what you say of Arabi and especially his want of physical courage I doubt whether he could have formed a stable government in Egypt. Sooner or later the question of financial control would have arisen and would have forced an issue not very different from that which was arrived at. What occurred was in fact the logical conclusion of the policy of financial control that was the _fons et origo mali_.’

“_6th Jan._—The ‘Daily News’ announces what seems to be the death of the ‘Times,’ at any rate of the ‘Times’ as we have known it. If true this will be a new scalp for me.

“_7th Jan._—It is officially announced that the ‘Times’ is to be turned into a Limited Liability Company under the chairmanship of Walter and that the director manager is to be Pearson. This means that the old ‘Times’ is indeed dead, and Moberly Bell discarded, a swift triumph for my pamphlet. I cannot help, however, regretting the old Thunderer now he is gone.

“‘Zeus, thy right hand is unloaded

Where the thunder did prevail.

In the idiocy of Godhead

Thou art staring the stars pale;

And thine eagle blind and old

Roughs his feathers in the cold.

Now Pan is dead!’

[The pamphlet here referred to was one I had just published against the ‘Times’ in connection with certain letters published by their manager, Moberly Bell, containing attacks on me which the ‘Times’ had refused me my right of reply to. The matter is not of sufficient consequence to include in the present volume.]

“_10th Jan._—I have been reading Miss Petre’s book, ‘Catholicism and Independence.’ It interests me immensely, and surprises me also, for I did not at all guess her intellectual gifts. These essays show her to be the best serious woman writer of her time. She has certain qualities women rarely possess, precision, sense of proportion, accuracy of illustration. Her psychology is original and true.

“_18th Jan._—We have had a little festivity arranged for us by my bailiff, Laker. Eight or nine old men and young from the parish who sang Sussex songs, well supplied with beer in the business room, some of the singing very good, and so all the evening till a nine gallon barrel was empty. Though I have lived off and on at Newbuildings for close on forty years I had never before heard these songs.

“_24th Jan._—The latest scandal is about the theft of the Crown Jewels in Dublin, one of the same kind that caused so much scandal at Berlin. It is being hushed up, it is said, because a full revelation would make the Government of Ireland impossible.

“_26th Jan._—Ouida is dead, poor woman, in great poverty at Villareggio. She had continued her correspondence with Cockerell ever since we saw her at Lucca.

“_28th Jan._—In the afternoon I sat to Neville for my portrait. Coming back with him we met his Aunt T. (Mrs. Earle) at her door, and went back with her to tea. She is a most amusing woman, and told us a number of good things. While there, Cambon, the French Ambassador, looked in. We had not met for several years. ‘Ah, Voilà l’ami des Arabes,’ was his greeting.

“_30th Jan._—George Wyndham came to lunch with me. He is hopeful about the political situation from his party point of view. He considers that the Government has got into difficulties all round, in the Transvaal, in India, and at home. He is now an out-and-out Tariff Reformer, and expects to win on it. Campbell Bannerman is seriously ill, and the Government have mismanaged things absurdly in Ireland. He is glad the Irish Nationalists have settled their differences. The scandal about the Crown Jewels is sure to come out, and the Government’s position is a quite impossible one. It is Birrell’s fault, he says, who is idle about his work, and was away abroad amusing himself when the discovery of the loss of the jewels was made. In his absence Macdonnell had decided that the best way of treating the matter would be to get rid of Vicars on some other pretext, and then Macdonnell also went away. Birrell, however, on his return ordered an inquiry, and this gave Vicars, who had taken good legal advice, his opportunity. The inquiry was to be held in secret, and not on oath, and Vicars refused to give evidence before it, claiming publicity. Macdonnell was very angry about this on his return, hence the rumours of his resignation, and now they don’t know at all what to do, for the King is furious at the idea of there being a scandal here like the one at Berlin, and it cannot long be kept secret as everybody at Dublin knows it. As to who actually took the jewels George does not know. Lord Aberdeen had made himself a laughing stock at Dublin in connection with it. Vicars had gone to him and had bullied him, and had chivied Aberdeen round the room when he had said that he could not give an answer without consulting Birrell, but George does not profess to know the whole facts of the case.

“_2nd Feb. (Sunday)._—Lunched at the French Embassy. On my way there I saw placards in the streets announcing the assassination of the King of Portugal and his heir apparent. Cambon was of course full of this sinister event. He told us that he had only yesterday received a letter from Lisbon dated the 29th, warning him of the existence of a conspiracy against the King. It had been written to him by a leader of the constitutional opposition, and Cambon considered the assassination to be the work, not of anarchists, but of political opponents of the King’s unconstitutional rule. For some time past Portugal has been governed, not by Parliamentary ministers, but despotically by decree, Franco, the King’s minister, having made himself with the King’s support Dictator. ‘One must not,’ Cambon said, ‘take a Parliamentary _régime_ in Portugal seriously, any more than in Persia or Turkey. The mass of the peasants care nothing for politics, and questions of Constitution only concern a few people. He would not hear of its being the work of anarchists. It was rather the way in which political party strife manifested itself in Portugal, the struggle of one party against another for the loaves of office; there had been great corruption there.

“Mrs. Earle was at the luncheon, and Mrs. Arkwright, and Mrs. Crawshay; the last told me that she had lunched yesterday with Margot, and had learned from her that it was definitely settled that Asquith should have Campbell Bannerman’s succession, whenever he retires from the premiership. The only competitor had been Grey, but Grey had said that he was overworked already at the Foreign Office and could not undertake it. Asquith intends as soon as the event happens to dissolve parliament, and go to the country for a new mandate.

“_5th Feb._—John Dillon came to see me and we had a long and most interesting talk. He told me first about Irish politics, how all the Parliamentary party had come together again, and were working together pleasantly, ‘even Healy, though he and I have not spoken for fifteen years.’ They have come to terms, too, with the Government, the Government having engaged themselves to pass a resolution in favour of Home Rule this Session. All will vote for it, even Asquith, and Grey, and Haldane. This will bind the Liberal Party once more to a Home Rule policy, and they will ask a mandate for it at the next General Election. He spoke well of Birrell. ‘Birrell,’ he said, ‘has refused to use coercion in Ireland, in spite of tremendous pressure brought to bear upon him.’ I told him what I had heard of Asquith’s intention of dissolving parliament, and he said he thought it very likely, but it was not improbable the Liberals would be beaten at the election. This brought us to general politics, and the rupture there was sure to be between the Labour Party and the Liberals, with an eventual division of the country into a Conservative party, and a party more or less socialistic of opposition, such as there is in Germany. Dillon is much more of a democrat than I am, though neither of us is at all Socialist. Dillon is for Colonial Federation, and is not without a tinge of Imperialism. He is a believer in the ‘Yellow Peril,’ and thinks that the Colonies if left to themselves will be sooner or later invaded by Asiatics. Australia and Canada, he says, are rapidly becoming Catholic countries. I asked him the reason of this, and he told me that in both Colonies, and for that matter in the United States, the English colonists had left off breeding children and so were dying out, whereas the Irish, French, and Italian colonists continued to have large families. It was entirely owing to the influence of the Catholic Church which forbade the use of restrictions. Dillon avowed a strong belief in the Italians as ‘a thoroughly virile race, physically and intellectually, and that it will survive when others succumb, in spite of Lord Salisbury’s ridiculous pronouncement about the Latin races.’ The Boers of South Africa are another vigorous race for which he has the greatest admiration. He is for Colonial Federation on their account. They would outlive the other white races in South Africa, and the connection with England would preserve them from trouble with Germany. He is entirely against the Indians in the Transvaal, and has not much sympathy with the blacks; he would not agree with me when I said there would be recognized slavery in South Africa before another generation was out. This could only be by the extermination of the warlike tribes, but that is just what I think will be done, when the feebler tribes will be reduced to forced labour, perhaps on wages, but still forced.

“As to India, Dillon professed to have no knowledge, but thought that its connection with the British Empire could not long be preserved, in face of the awakening of the East through the successes of Japan. His Imperialism only applies to the white Colonies. He stopped to luncheon, but did not talk much himself as a Mr. Percy Addleshaw had joined us, having come to see me, it so happened, to talk about this very question of India. Addleshaw is an old pupil and friend of York Powell’s, in bad health, who has become acquainted with some of the Indian leaders.

“_10th Feb._—The Bellocs came to tea bringing with them Bron Herbert, now Lord Lucas, as good and charming a young man as he was ten years ago when I saw him last at Oldhouse. He tells me his sister Nan has made Oldhouse over to the Theosophists, the sect founded by Madame Blavatsky, which she has joined.

“As I was at dinner a telegram from Rothstein was brought me announcing the death of Mustapha Kamel. Though Malony had written me news of his illness only a few days ago, the telegram was to me a great shock.

“_11th Feb._—The news of Kamel’s death is in all the papers.

“Morley has announced in Parliament a punitive expedition in India against the Agha Khels. In this, as in all his policy at the India Office, he follows the permanent official lead, being the weak man he is.

“To London and saw Rothstein who gave me the Egyptian news. Mustapha Kamel had been ailing for some time past and had had a congestion of the lungs from which he was recovering, but going out too soon had a relapse. His, however, has always been a frail life and the first time I saw him, a year and a half ago, I doubted whether he would live long. We had a suspicion then that he took some drug, probably morphia, as a stimulant to enable him to do his excessive work. He always lived at high pressure and seldom took a rest.

“_12th Feb._—Brailsford called to consult me about a visit he is to pay to Egypt. I explained the situation there as far as I knew it and besought him to do his best to encourage Mustapha Kamel’s followers and find a successor for him and bring about a fusion of the various sections of the National Party. Brailsford goes with me in believing that a forward policy of strong opposition to the English occupation is the only one likely to have any effect. A policy of supplication will obtain nothing. Brailsford is a thorough going good fellow, a quite sound Nationalist, with some experience of the East; I am glad he is going to Cairo.

“To see Shaw’s play, ‘Arms and the Man,’ which amused me immensely. I laughed from beginning to end of it. There is not a word in it that is not good, and it is a splendid _reductio ad absurdum_ of the romance of war.

“_13th Feb._—The Paris ‘Temps’ has a panegyric of Mustapha Kamel. Fifty thousand people followed his funeral at Cairo, so says Reuter, though the ‘Times’ reduces it to ten thousand. This is a wonderful testimony to so young a man. He was only thirty-four.

“_20th Feb._—Mohammed Farid has been chosen to take Mustapha Kamel’s place in Egypt. It was he who, at the Mohammedan Conference, at Algiers, had the courage to denounce French rule there.

“Morley has begun a new war in India against the Afridis under the direction of Kitchener, whom in 1889 he attacked for his brutalities of warfare in the Soudan. Now he finds it all right and proper.

“There has been talk of intervention by Austria and by Russia in the Balkans, as to which I have no special knowledge or opinion except the general one that it is desirable in the interests of the rest of the Eastern world that the two Empires should quarrel.

“_22nd Feb._—Belloc came to ride with us and stayed to luncheon afterwards. He is no great horseman, and came mounted on an ancient mare of his he calls Monster, which he rides in blinkers. He is very pleased just now with having succeeded in bringing forward in the House of Commons the case he has had _in petto_ for a long time, of the employment of secret party funds. Talking of Mustapha Kamel’s death he declares that the Jews in France are beginning to think that a National movement in Egypt may create trouble for them financially and perhaps it would be better the English occupation was ended. If that is so we shall not remain there long.

“_27th Feb._—Cromer’s book on Egypt is out. The historical part, as far as I am concerned, is of small importance, being poorly done, and without the writer’s having taken the trouble to go thoroughly into any obscure matters. It is interspersed with notes referring to my book, acid in tone, but with no attempt to deal with the charges made in it against our diplomacy.

“_5th March._—Farid Bey writes telling me of his succession to the Leadership of the National Party in Egypt, and begging me to continue my support and advice.

“_10th March._—We have been issuing circulars to friends asking subscriptions to the Denshawai Memorial School. Evelyn with his usual generosity has at once sent a cheque of £120. I have answered Farid’s letter in one dated _6th March_ as to their line of policy.

“_11th March._—This afternoon as the hounds were running across my fields I joined them on my old grey mare, Shiekha. She was excited and enjoying the sport when I found her beginning to stagger about, and had just time to get off her when she fell back, gave a gasp and slight struggle, and was dead. The poor old mare was over twenty years of age and had become rather infirm, and it is well for her. She died with as little pain as any creature can suffer. [This was my last appearance with any hounds.]

“_12th March._—Chapel Street. Walking in the Park, found John Redmond riding, and had some talk with him about Egypt and Ireland. Then Cunninghame Graham joined us. He is just back from Morocco, and declares himself in favour of Mulai Hafid as Sultan. I am glad of that, as the French seem tempted to use Abdul Aziz exactly as we used Tewfik in Egypt. If it had not been for Mulai Hafid’s rising and proclamation of himself as Sultan, the French Government would have advanced £6,000,000 to Abdul Aziz, and thus committed themselves to the Government of Morocco. I asked his help to get our Labour members to move in matters of this sort, but he tells me they are a hopeless lot. When they get into Parliament they are at once bitten with the absurd idea that they are to be no longer working men, but statesmen, and they try to behave as such. ‘I tell them,’ said Graham, ‘that they would do more good if they came to the House in a body drunk and tumbling about on the floor.’

“_13th March._—Spent an hour with Margot at her house in Cavendish Square. She is talking already about her impending move to 10 Downing Street, for Asquith is to have Campbell Bannerman’s succession as Prime Minister and so she will at last gain the object of her ambition. She intends to do things splendidly as Prime Minister’s wife; neither Mrs. Gladstone nor Lady Salisbury had taken advantage of the social side of her duties, only she will be terribly hampered for a sufficient income to do it on. Among other things she talked about Cromer, with whom she had been playing bridge yesterday, and how he had told her of his wish to re-enter political life. ‘He fancies,’ she said, ‘that he can make a party with George Curzon and a few other free trade Unionists. His difficulty is that he cannot swallow old age pensions.’ This is funny, considering his own old age pension of £50,000 which he swallowed without winking.

“_19th March._—John Redmond lunched with me. He says a resolution in favour of Home Rule will certainly be passed this session, binding the Liberal party once more to them, and they will bring in a Catholic University Bill, but he thinks that if Asquith dissolves, the Liberals would be beaten at the new election, mainly on account of the Licensing Bill. He has a small opinion of them. About Morley at the India Office he was very scornful, and repeated what he has more than once told me, that Morley was the weakest and worst Chief Secretary they ever had in Ireland.

“_20th March._—Nicholas O’Conor is dead at Constantinople, our Ambassador there, a very worthy fellow, a Catholic Irishman of no great ability, but amiable and good natured. He got shoved on early in his profession by Philip Currie, to whom he had proved _serviable_ at the Paris Embassy, paying attention to English ladies there, and helping them to buy their bonnets. He was rather a friend of Sarah Bernhardt’s, and I remember meeting him in the green room of whatever the theatre was, when Sarah first came over to England in the seventies. He is said to have done well at Constantinople.

“_26th March._—Several new books. Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘Memoirs,’ exceedingly well written and most amusing. Shelley’s letters to Miss Kitchener, also most amusing as well as amazing. Gosse’s ‘Father and Son.’ How Gosse can have written so good a book I cannot imagine, but it is altogether admirable.

“_1st April._—To see Lady C. who had written after a long interval. She talked about the Duke of Devonshire, just dead, repeating what I have often heard her say, that he was a thoroughly good fellow, but quite without intellect, who would have done nothing in politics if it had not been for the Duchess, who had insisted on it both before their marriage and afterwards. The old Duke, his father, was a far more distinguished man. She does Lord Hartington injustice, however, for though a slow thinker he was a considerable power in politics, capable of solid reasoning, if not of eloquence.

“_5th April._—Cromer’s son Errington was married yesterday to a daughter of Minto’s and there has been a grand _tamasha_ over it. He has been working a year past as Hardinge’s private secretary at the Foreign Office to fit him for a great career and the King’s favour.

“_6th April._—Campbell Bannerman has at last resigned and Asquith is to go to Biarritz to the King who is away there. I am writing to congratulate Margot.