at quarter sessions, or assizes, go by the plain names of outrage and murder, and he succeeds in drowning himself with the girl who hates him lashed to him by a chain.  In not one other character of the book is there an indication that life has an aim beyond the lusts of the flesh, and the most respectable characters are the tenants whose desires are summed up in the desire of more suet pudding and gravy!!  To any one who KNOWS the poor! who knows what faiths and hopes (true or untrue) support them in consumption and cancer, in hard lives and dreary deaths, the picture is as untrue as it is (to me!) disgusting.

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March 22, 1882.

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On Saturday night I went down with A. and L. to Battersea, to one of the People’s Concerts.  I enclose the programme.  It is years since I have enjoyed anything so much as Thomas’s Harp-playing. (He is not Ap-Thomas, but he is the Queen’s Harper.) His hands on those strings were the hands of a Wizard, and form and features nearly as quaint as those of Mawns seemed to dilate into those of a poet.  It was very marvellous.

Did I tell you that Lady L. has sent me a ticket this year for her Sunday afternoons at the Grosvenor?  We went on Sunday.  The paintings there just now are Watts’s.  Our old blind friend at Manchester has sent a lot.  It is a very fine collection.  I think few paintings do beat Watts’s ’Love and Death’—­Death, great and irresistible, wrapped in shrowd-like drapery, is pushing relentlessly over the threshold of a home, where the portal is climbed over by roses and a dove plays about the lintel.  You only see his back.  But, facing you, Love, as a young boy, torn and flushed with passion and grief, is madly striving to keep Death back, his arms strained, his wings crushed and broken in the unequal struggle.

Beside the paintings it was great fun seeing the company!  Princess Louise was there, and lots of minor stars.  And—­my Welsh Harper was there!  I had a long chat with him.  He talks like a true artist, and WE must know him hereafter.  When I said that when I heard him play the ‘Men of Harlech,’ I understood how Welshmen fought in the valleys if their harpers played upon the hills (most true!), he seized my hand in both his, and thanked me so excitedly I was quite alarmed for fear Mrs. Grundy had an eye round the corner!!!

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Amesbury, May 28, 1182.

...  ’Tis a sweet, sweet spot!  Not one jot or one tittle of the old charm has forsaken it.  Clean, clean shining streets and little houses, pure, pure air!—­a changeful and lovely sky—­the green watermeads and silvery willows—­the old patriarch in his smock—­the rushing of the white weir among the meadows, the grey bridge, the big, peaceful, shading trees, the rust-coloured lichen on the graves where the forefathers of the hamlet sleep (oh what a place for sleep!), the sublime serenity of that incomparable church tower, about which the starlings wheel, some of them speaking words outside, and others replying from the inside (where they have no business to be!) through the belfry windows in a strange chirruping antiphon, as if outside they sang: