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July 28, 1882.

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Last Saturday D. and I went down to Aldershot to the Flat Races!!!  As we went along, tightly packed in a carriage full of ladies in what may be termed “dazzling toilettes,” pretty girls and Dowager Mammas everywhere!—­and as we ran past the familiar “Brookwood North Camp,” where white “canvas” shone among the heather (and the heather, the cat heather, oh SO bonny! with here and there a network of the red threads of the dodder, so thick that it looked like red flowers), and all the ladies, young and old, craned forward to see the tents, etc., I really laughed at myself for the accuracy of my own descriptions in “Laetus”!  P. met us at the R.E.  Mess, where we had luncheon.  After lunch we went to the familiar stables, and inspected the kit for Egypt.  Then P. drove us to the Race Course.  I met a lot of old friends.  The Duke and Duchess of Connaught were there.  It all looked very pretty, the camp is so much grown up with plantations now.  The air was wondrous sweet.  P. drove us back to the Mess for tea, and then down to the station.  It was a great pleasure, though rather a sad one.  Everybody was very grave.  A sort of feeling, “What will be the end?"...

The Castle, Farnham. Aug. 17, 1882.

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It is one of the sides of X.’s mind which makes me feel her so limited an artist that she seems almost to take up a school as she takes up a lady-friend—­“one down another come on.”  I think her abuse of Wagner now curiously narrow.  I can’t see why one should not feel the full spell and greater purity of Brahms without dancing in his honour on Wagner’s bones!!  It seems like her refusing to see any merit in, or derive any enjoyment from modern pictures because she has been “posted” in the Early Italian School.  So from year to year these good people who have been to Florence will not even look at a painting by Brett or Peter Graham, though by the very qualities and senses through which one feels the sincerity, the purity, the nobleness, and the fine colour of those great painters, the photographs of whose pictures even stir one’s heart,—­one surely ought also to take delight in a landscape school which simply did not exist among the ancients.  If sea and sky as GOD spreads them before our eyes are admirable, I can’t think how one can be blind to delight in such pictures as ’The Fall of the Barometer,’ ‘The Incoming Tide,’ or Leader’s ’February Fill-dyke.’  Things which no Florentine ever approached, as transcripts of Nature’s mood apart from man....

Yesterday we had a most delicious drive through the heather and pines to Crookham.  Ah, ’tis a bonny country, and I did laugh when I said to Mr. Walkinshaw, “How glorious the heather is this year!” and he said, “Yes.  If only it was growing on its native heath.”  For a minute I couldn’t tell what he meant.  Then I discovered that he regards heather as the exclusive property of bonnie Scotland!!!