She draws people she has seen (Mrs. Poyser) like a photograph—­she imagines a Daniel Deronda, and he is about “as natural as waxworks.”

“I’ve been reading Jean Ingelow’s Fated to be Free lately, and it is a marvellous mixture of beauty and failure.  But lovely passages.  Incisive as G. Eliot, and from the point of view of a tenderer mind and experience.  This is beautiful, isn’t it?

“Nature before it has been touched by man is almost always beautiful, strong, and cheerful in man’s eyes; but nature, when he has once given it his culture and then forsaken it, has usually an air of sorrow and helplessness.  He has made it live the more by laying his hand upon it and touching it with his life.  It has come to relish of his humanity, and it is so flavoured with his thoughts, and ordered and permeated by his spirit, that if the stimulus of his presence is withdrawn it cannot for a long while do without him, and live for itself as fully and as well as it did before.”

The double edge of the sentiment is very exquisite, and the truth of the natural fact very perfect as observation, and the book is full of such writing.  But oh, dear! the confusion of plot is so maddening you have a delirious feeling that everybody is getting engaged to his half-sister or widowed stepmother, and keep turning back to make sure!  But the dramatism is very good and leads you on....

March 22, 1880.

...  I am getting you a curious little present.  It is Thos.  A Kempis’s De Imitatione Christi in Latin and Arabic.  A scarce edition printed in Rome.  I think you will like to have it.  That old Thomas was much more than a mere monk.  A man for all time, his monasticism being but a fringe upon the robe of his wisdom and honest Love of God.  It will be curious to see how it lends itself to Arabic.  Well, I fancy.  Being in very proverbial mould.  Such verses as this (I quote roughly from memory): 

“That which thou dost not understand when thou readest thou shalt understand in the day of thy visitation:  for there be secrets of religion which are not known till they be felt and are not felt but in the Day of a great calamity!” (a piece of wisdom with application to other experiences besides religious ones).  I think this will read well in the language of the East.  As also “In omnibus rebus Respice Finem,” etc.....

* * * * *

Tuesday.

I am quite foolishly disappointed.  The A Kempis is gone already!  It is a new Catalogue, and I fancied it was an out-o’-way chance.  It seems Ridler has no other Arabic books whatever.  He may not have known its value.  It “went” for six shillings!!!

* * * * *

TO THE BISHOP OF FREDERICTON.

131, Finborough Road, South Kensington. March 23, 1880.

MY DEAR LORD,