When Symonds died I lost my best intellectual tutor as well as one of my dearest friends.  I wish I had taken his advice and seriously tried to write years ago, but, except for a few magazine sketches, I have never written a line for publication in my life.  I have only kept a careful and accurate diary, [Footnote:  Out of all my diaries I have hardly been able to quote fifty pages, for on re-reading them I find they are not only full of Cabinet secrets but jerky, disjointed and dangerously frank.] and here, in the interests of my publishers and at the risk of being thought egotistical, it is not inappropriate that I should publish the following letters in connection with these diaries and my writing: 

21 Carlyle mansions, Cheyne walk, S.W.

April 9th, 1915.

My dear Margot Asquith,

By what felicity of divination were you inspired to send me a few days ago that wonderful diary under its lock and key?—­feeling so rightly certain, I mean, of the peculiar degree and particular pang of interest that I should find in it?  I don’t wonder, indeed, at your general presumption to that effect, but the mood, the moment, and the resolution itself conspired together for me, and I have absorbed every word of every page with the liveliest appreciation, and I think I may say intelligence.  I have read the thing intimately, and I take off my hat to you as to the very Balzac of diarists.  It is full of life and force and colour, of a remarkable instinct for getting close to your people and things and for squeezing, in the case of the resolute portraits of certain of your eminent characters, especially the last drop of truth and sense out of them—­at least as the originals affected your singularly searching vision.  Happy, then, those who had, of this essence, the fewest secrets or crooked lives to yield up to you—­for the more complicated and unimaginable some of them appear, the more you seem to me to have caught and mastered them.  Then I have found myself hanging on your impression in each case with the liveliest suspense and wonder, so thrillingly does the expression keep abreast of it and really translate it.  This and your extraordinary fullness of opportunity, make of the record a most valuable English document, a rare revelation of the human inwardness of political life in this country, and a picture of manners and personal characters as “creditable” on the whole (to the country) as it is frank and acute.  The beauty is that you write with such authority, that you’ve seen so much and lived and moved so much, and that having so the chance to observe and feel and discriminate in the light of so much high pressure, you haven’t been in the least afraid, but have faced and assimilated and represented for all you’re worth.