It was about the time of the publication of my letter to the Irish Times, mentioned in the last pages of Salve, that I received from the French Consul an invitation to dinner to meet the Secretary of the Consulate, M. Orange, a young man, a poet, au moins il a publié un volume de vers chez Lemerre. The Méaulles, Monsieur et Madame, are among my pleasantest memories of Dublin, and on the night in question, when it was time to bid our host and hostess good night, I proposed to Orange that we should walk back to Dublin together, thinking that perhaps he might like to talk French poetry with me. As we passed through the garden-gate he muttered: voilà une soirée bien passée. He was quite right; we had passed a pleasant evening in pleasant company. But when he repeated the same words at the same place the next time we dined at the Méaulles', I began to read into them a hidden meaning: that we were nearer our graves than we had been earlier in the afternoon; and when he repeated the same words some weeks afterwards, and in the same place, they took on still another meaning: that we being men of letters would have done better had we stayed at home reading books under our lamps. And as we strode along together I resolved that I would reacquire the habit of reading without it occurring to me that the temptation is always by the talker to lay his book aside and go out to look up a friend, especially in Dublin, where casual visiting is our single pleasure.

And Orange's criticism of life leaving me no peace, I begged Teresa one evening, after she had removed the cloth, to tell whosoever called that I was not at home; and when she had put my coffee on the table I said: The moment has come for me to pick out a book from the shelves. But which? I knew that a large volume containing Shakespeare's plays stood on the third shelf and that I should find in it a well of pure literature undefiled. Alarums, excursions, and the blowing of trumpets over the field of Agincourt, Kings in full armour rushing about crying for destriers—the French word for what we would call a cob, compact and thick-set. He charges like a destrier in the Henrys, and after the charge retires to a hawthorn-tree and neighs a melodious plaint of graves and worms and epitaphs. But Balzac appealed to me for a moment and my eyes ran through the titles of the edition printed in 1855, a prize brought back from Paris some months ago, but never looked into; treated, alas! like a wife, a sort of matrimonial edition, and only known to me by a long attempt to read César Birotteau, an adventure that had stopped half-way, so cumbersome was the burly Tourainean in this story, so slow was he to rise, like a cart-horse asleep in the middle of the road, too heavy to struggle to his hooves in less than a hundred pages, but getting away at last. His ends are no doubt fine and thunderous. All the same, Turgenev didn't believe in him, and glancing down a line of small volumes I said: Turgenev is neither cob nor dray, but an Arab carrying in every story a lady as romantic as one of Chopin's ballads, especially the third, and I thought of the celebrated phrase. Maupassant detained me for a moment and then seemed to me too much like an intrigue with a housemaid. Goncourt? The fashion of yesterday and today older than Herodotus. Pater? His Epicurean? A tide of honeyed words preached by a divine from an ivory pulpit, well worth re-reading but—

And I returned to my chair frightened, feeling that if I did not learn to read my life would become a burden to me and to others. Everybody will fly from me, my friends will melt away. Edward wouldn't open to me the other night, he preferred his book to my talk, and he continues to struggle through Ruskin, and John Eglinton toils at Don Quixote. Those fellows can live alone, and AE ... ah, well, AE! And then my thoughts left me. I read the newspaper, and at a quarter to eleven lit my candle, hoping that in bed some interesting book would come to mind. But when Teresa had removed the cloth the next night and the moment for choosing had come again, I was unable to conquer a mysterious reluctance. It seemed pleasanter to think about Stevenson than to read him, and of all, to remember that I had once called him a young man walking in the Burlington Arcade, the best-dressed young man that ever walked in the Burlington Arcade, but little else. We writers know how to get the knife under the other fellow's ribs. I raised my head to listen: footsteps sounded in the street, and it seemed as if somebody was coming to see me.... The moment grew tense and relaxed, and when the footsteps of the wanderer died away in the distance of Hume Street, I sat limp and miserable, afraid to look round lest somebody should be crouching in the corner of the distant room.

But I had come home to read, and read I must, and it seemed to me that what was needed was some long work that would leave a definite impression upon the mind. There was Tom Jones; professors of literature declare it to be England's finest novel, but I remembered it merely as a very empty work written in a breezy manner; and there was Richardson whom I had not read at all; Clarissa Harlowe in how many volumes of letters? And after these writers came Miss Burney, and the name of one of her books floated through my mind, the name of some woman, Emily, Julia—no. There was Sterne's Sentimental Journey still unread, and some one had given me a copy saying that no one would ever appreciate Sterne more than I.... But my cigar was burning so fragrantly that Sterne was once again postponed, and I lay back in the armchair, dozing in the warmth that a huge lump of coal sent out from the grate, and, my brain stupefied in the heat, I said to myself: Though I may have lost the habit of reading, I have acquired, perhaps more than any other human being, another habit, the habit of thinking. I love my own thoughts; and the past is a wonderful mirror in which I spend hours watching people and places I have known; dim, shadowy and far away they seem, and pathetic are the faces, and still more pathetic is the way everybody follows his little prejudices; however unreasonable they may be we must follow them. The Colonel said the other day that he could accept all that his Church teaches; Transubstantiation, the Immaculate Conception, even the Pope's indulgences did not trouble him; he found it difficult, however, to believe in the immortality of his soul. If Death deprives me of my senses of feeling and seeing, of my intellect, of everything that is me, how can it be said that I exist? he asked, shielding his face with his hand from the fire. How can it be said that I, the personality connoted by the pronoun, exist? We are all Agnostics at heart. And then it seemed to me that the Colonel and I were engaged in some argument, not about the immortality of the soul, but about a letter that I had written to the Irish Times in which he declared that I had libelled him, and then my father seemed to have come back to this world again, and, picking up the letter about which my brother and I were disputing, he declared that he could detect no libel in it but a great many misspellings and mistakes in grammar, and that I must go back to Oscott at once. I was there in a trice, face to face with the headmaster, no other than Sir Thomas More, who was deeply shocked that any descendant of his should use the language as badly as I had done in the bundle of papers which he held in his hand....

The thought of undergoing further school-days awoke me suddenly, and at the same moment the door opened. Good Heavens! Who is it? What is it?

It was only Teresa bringing in glasses and decanters, and when I had recovered my senses sufficiently I began to think of the two portraits of Sir Thomas More brought from Ashbrook. The heavy monkish jowl and the cocked hat had often awakened a frightened antipathy in me, setting me thinking that there must be a fine strain of Protestant blood flowing in the Moores. But which was the one who discovered himself to be a Protestant? I moved to the writing-table and wrote asking the Colonel for his name, and a few days after Teresa handed me an envelope on which I recognised my brother's handwriting, and making at once for my armchair, I read that Sir Thomas More had married twice, begetting a son and three daughters by his first wife. These had remained Papists, and it was not till the second generation that the change came. John had two sons, both called Thomas. The elder founded the line of Barnborough, now extinct; but the younger Thomas discovered himself to be a Protestant, and the Colonel reminded me that if I decided to throw over Sir Thomas More I should also have to throw over the honour of having a Protestant clergyman in the family. The clergyman had three sons, of whom little is known except their names. Two of them went to live in Essex; the third, another Thomas, disappeared into Mayo, it is said.

This tradition, the Colonel wrote, finds support in the fact that there was a Thomas More in Mayo in the seventeenth century who had a son called George, and this George took part in the Williamite wars in Ireland, and it appears that he must have conducted himself well at the Battle of the Boyne, for King William bestowed on him the title of Vice-Admiral of Connaught, a title which he held twice, a considerable title still, for its present holder is Lord Lucan. He was buried near Straid Abbey in Mayo, with this inscription upon his tomb: THIS IS THE BURIAL PLACE OF CAPTAIN GEORGE MORE AND HIS DESCENDANTS, 1723. His son obtained a lease of some property known as Legaphouca, and from this deed we learn that he had two sons, George and John, and that John married Miss Jane Lynch Athy of Renvyle, a Catholic, and brought her to live with him at Ashbrook. Of this marriage there were two sons; one died, and the surviving son, George, seeing that the family fortunes were dwindling, sailed away to Spain and became a Catholic.

But why doesn't he tell me our great-grandfather's reasons for preferring Rome to Canterbury? And taking a cigar out of the box, I lay back in my armchair, and whilst watching the smoke ascend into the crystals of the chandelier, tarnishing them and diverting my thoughts from my great-grandfather, I remembered that the whole chandelier must soon be taken to pieces and cleaned, and that on the night of our quarrel, or rather the following morning, the Colonel had told me that our great-grandfather married a Miss Kilkelly, a Spaniard despite her name, if a hundred years of Spain can turn a Milesian back into a Spaniard. Wild Geese these Kilkellys were, fled from Ireland after the siege of Limerick—a handsome woman in a green silk dress, heavily flounced, her hands on the keys of a spinet, the kind of woman who would tempt a man to become a Catholic, a merchant interested above all in his business and only faintly in religious questions. It was she that did it. And he felt no repugnance in being bedded with a Papist ... strange.



How little these Papists understand religion, I said, and walked about the room muttering. He could not very well ask me to picture the great merchant retiring to his room after business hours to read the Fathers, so he concludes that it was his mother's influence that effected the conversion. Ary Scheffer's picture of St Augustine and Monica rose up before my eyes, and I vowed that it was kelp that had turned my great-grandfather into a Papist. Much better it should have been kelp than Kempis, I said; much better for me. And it amused me to think of the ships laden with seaweed coming round the Bay of Biscay from the Arran Islands to my great-grandfather in Alicante, and the burnt kelp filling the iron chest (still at Moore Hall), and quickly, with ducats, and my great-grandfather returning to Ireland, a sort of mercantile pirate of the Spanish Main. The Colonel's letter told me that it was with two hundred and fifty thousand pounds he returned, on the lookout for investments for his money, and for a site whereon to build the fine Georgian house he had in mind. He would have built it at Ashbrook if there had been a prospect, but there being none, he bought Muckloon, a pleasant green hill overlooking Lough Carra; and the Colonel mentioned that our great-grandfather used to sit on the steps of Moore Hall, his eyes fixed on the lake. I have travelled far, he is reported to have said, but have seen nothing as beautiful as Lough Carra. And he is reported truly, for such simple words are not invented. The phrase evokes a picture: A morning in early May, and an elderly man sitting, his eyes fixed on a lake set among low shores, still as a mirror—a mirror on which somebody has breathed—an elderly man in a wig and a scarlet coat. It is thus that he is apparelled in the portrait that hangs in the dining-room, painted when and by whom there is no record. In it he is a man of thirty, and when he was thirty he was in Alicante. It is pleasant to have a portrait of one's ancestor in a wig, and in a vermilion coat with gold lace and buttons, white lace at the collar and cuffs—probably a Spanish coat of the period. The face is long, sheeplike, and distinguished—the true Moore face as it has come down to us. My brother Augustus was the living image of his great-grandfather—the same long face, the same long, delicately shaped nose, without, however, the gay eyes, cloudless as a child's. No face ever told the tale of a happy life more plainly, nor could it be else, everything having succeeded with him. He seemed to have run misfortune clean out of sight, but he had made a little too much running, and was overtaken in the last few years. On awakening one morning he asked his valet why he had not opened the shutters. The servant answered that he had opened them. But the room is dark. No, sir; the room is quite light. Then I am blind! he said.

Who has heard of a more horrible discovery than to have gone blind in one's sleep? Is it to be wondered that his courage died, and that the rest of his life was lived between priest and doctor, in terror of death? for he had become a Catholic. Nor were blindness and fear of death all his misfortunes. His wife wearied of Moore Hall, and her sons bored her. Peter was witless; John, the first President of the Irish Republic, was arrested at Athlone and driven along the roads with other rebels to Castlebar. He died in prison. George, the eldest son, a mild, visionary youth, was interested in literature, and was admired and made much of at Holland House, so the Colonel tells me. And without wife or child the last years of the blind man at Moore Hall must have been very sad and lonely. One room was the same as another to him, and with the disappearance of the lake his thoughts returned to Ashbrook, and the little Protestant cemetery near Straid Abbey. He was the last who thought of Ashbrook with affection. My father did not seem to like to speak of the place; he only went there to collect rents, and the same unsentimental errand took me to Ashbrook when I returned from Paris in 1880. Tom Ruttledge and I had driven through Mayo, visiting all my estates, trying to come to terms with the tenants, and at Ashbrook a crowd had followed the car up a boreen, babbling of the disastrous year they had been through: the potato crop had been a failure; there was no diet in them.

The phrase caught on my ear, and I remember well the two-storeyed house standing on a bare hillside. The woods had been felled long ago, all except a few ash-trees left standing in the corner of the field to shelter the cattle from the wind, and the house, having been inhabited by peasants for a long time, presented a sad degradation, a sagging roof, and windows so black that I did not dare to think of the staircase leading to the drawing-room, in which my great-grandmother had stitched that pretty piece of tapestry which is now in the Kensington Museum. Dunne, my tenant, a heavy, surly fellow, whose manners were not engaging (we heard afterwards he was the leader of a notable conspiracy against us), asked us to step inside, but fearing to meet with chickens in the parlour that perhaps still had the ancient paper on its walls, I pleaded that the day was drawing to a close, and asked him if he would be kind enough to take me to my great-grandfather's grave. He turned aside, and the peasants answering for him said:

Sure we will your honour.

So this is the brook, I thought to myself, and watched the water trickle through masses of weeds and rushes. We crossed some fields and came to a ruined chapel, and my peasants pointed to an incised stone let into the wall, the loneliest grave it seemed to me in all the world; and drowsing in my armchair, unable to read, the sadness that I had experienced returned to me, and I felt and saw as I had done thirty years before. I had thought then of the poor old man who had built Moore Hall deciding at last that his ashes were to be carried to Ashbrook. But the Colonel, I said, mentions Straid Abbey as the burial-place of Captain George Moore and his descendants, and the little ruined chapel that was shown to me can't be Straid Abbey.

A few days afterwards another letter came from the Colonel replying to my reproaches that his answers to my questions were vague and insufficient, and from this letter I learnt that my great-grandfather's misfortunes did not cease with his death. He had left instructions in his will that he wished to be buried with his ancestors in the little Protestant cemetery near Straid Abbey. The Colonel had discovered it half a mile down the road, after having searched Straid Abbey vainly for the tomb of Captain George Moore, and his letter told me how he had had some difficulty in pushing his way through a mass of briars and hemlock and in finding the inscription among the ruins of the church; but he had found it.

So it was there that my great-grandfather had wished to be buried, but he was buried at Ashbrook in a Catholic chapel. By mistake, the Colonel says in his letter. By mistake! I cried. Any breach of faith were better than that he should be laid with his Protestant forebears. The Irish Spaniard, Catholic, back, belly, and sides, would not have hesitated to ignore her husband's instructions. She must have come from London, for George the historian, an Agnostic like his master Gibbon, would have buried his father as the will directed, if he had not been overcome by his mother, who, of course, would like to conceal the fact that she had married a man of such certain Protestantism that at the last he had chosen to be buried in a Protestant cemetery. I should like to know who was at this funeral, and if the historian came over from London to attend it or remained gadding about Holland House, or courting Louisa Browne, whom he afterwards married in spite of the fact that it was her uncle or her brother who secured the conviction of John Moore, the historian's brother. That marriage would have added another grief to the old merchant's many griefs.

A portrait of Louisa hangs in the dining-room, and she appears in it as a voluptuous young woman wrapped in gauze, and by her hangs the portrait of her uncle, Lord Altamont, a copy of the portrait by Reynolds in Westport House. Both are indifferent works, but there is a good picture in the dining-room at Moore Hall, a portrait of my grandfather painted in 1836, certainly not earlier, and therefore not a Raeburn. Nor is it a Catterson Smith, who was painting at that time in Dublin, for his thick, heavy touch is nowhere visible in grandfather's portrait. The drawing is sure, almost unconscious, revealing an old man with white hair growing scantily about a high forehead, and though no books are in the background, we divine a library and a life sheltered from every misfortune. Who could have painted the portrait? Wilkie, perhaps. He was painting about that time. But there are few life-size portraits by Wilkie, and in none that I have seen is the drawing so thoughtful, nor does he show much interest in character except in this portrait. He seems to have said in it all that my grandfather tells us about himself in his preface to the French Revolution. A very remarkable portrait, no doubt, and for a long time I sat struggling with an idea that would not come into a phrase: that the picture and the preface might be compared to the music and words, opera and libretto, something like that. But it would not come, and I got up and took the preface out of the drawer.

PREFACE TO MY HISTORICAL MEMOIRS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, TO BE PUBLISHED AFTER MY DEATH.

August 20, 1837.

I, this day, complete my sixty-fourth year. I have for some time been engaged in a history of the French Revolution. I early in life began collecting books on this subject, and they now fill up an entire side of my very pretty library in this beautiful place. They are most of them bad in style, and worse in spirit and sentiment. There are few of them which I could endure reading were it not for the task I have laid down for myself. This task has the effect of giving interest to the most wretched productions. Any book which offers me a choice of a new fact, or the solution of any difficulty attached to old facts, interests me, and I find amusement in examining it. Amusement and the banishment of what the French call ennui are my principal objects. Beautiful as this place is, and much as I love it, I confess I have not always been able to exclude ennui from its precincts. There are hours in which I have not been able to keep it away; general vague reading, without any specific object, afforded me no protection against it, but since I have sat down to my task I scarcely have known what it is. I have a rough copy carried on nearly to the present time. To every written page I have left a blank one, in which I put down any new facts or reflections or news. I wish to go on for some time longer in this manner. But my age, as mentioned at the head of this preface, admonishes me there is no time to be lost if I wish the public ever to have an insight into my history. My rough copy with alternate blank pages it is impossible for any one to make anything of, and it is not till after my death I wish my history to appear, not in the form in which my rough copy exhibits it.

I have several times published, but never with any success, so that I am tired of publication in my lifetime. Besides, as I foresee my history will be pretty voluminous, I do not like the trouble of superintending the proofs. As I am a man of fortune, I leave by my will five hundred pounds to defray the expenses of publication. As the publication is in this manner ordered and appointed by me in my testamentary deposition, no one who survives me will be answerable for anything it contains. I foresee many things I say will give offence, but my objects are truth and my country. As amusement was my great object in undertaking this task, it may be said I have already gained my end in never knowing ennui since I began it. But having written a history of the French Revolution, impregnated with all the feelings and sentiments of an Englishman, and written in a style, I hope, purely and thoroughly English, I am ambitious it should be read after me. I have had no celebrity in my life. But a prospect of this posthumous fame pleases me at this moment. I may say with Erasmus: Illud certe praesagio, de meis lucubrationibus, qualescumque sunt, candidius, judicaturam posteritatem, though I cannot add with him: Tametsi nec de meo seculo queri possum. Having missed the applause, and even notice, of my age, I ought, perhaps, to be indifferent about the opinions of those that follow; their applause, should I ever gain it, will not reach me when the grave has closed over me. This is true; but we are so made that while we are living we think with pleasure that we shall not be forgotten after our deaths. The nature of this feeling is beautifully expressed by Fielding in a passage which Gibbon has transcribed in the account of his own life. What adds to my wish that my history should be read after my death is that I am convinced no account of the great event of the French Revolution in all its parts will be fair and impartial coming from a Frenchman, none certainly will do justice to my country. I am anxious to have the merits of the Duke of Wellington duly appreciated as having done more in war than any captain that ever existed. He entered on the contest with more disadvantages on his side, as will be explained in the history. He had greater difficulties to encounter, and arrived at more glorious results. Though not a Frenchman, I am perfectly acquainted with the French language, and there are few Frenchmen better informed with respect to the history, literature, and what are called the statistics of France than I am, so that I conceive myself perfectly well qualified, as much as any Frenchman, for the task I have undertaken. In this improved copy which I am now transcribing, I break the history into chapters, with a view to the grouping of the facts of which it consists. It is this which I call grouping that distinguishes the task of the historian from that of the annotist, and there is no point of greater importance in a history than the manner in which this grouping is executed. The deficiencies of some celebrated historians in this particular may be noticed....

How abruptly it breaks off! Some pages must have been mislaid! and I sought among the litter in the drawer, and finding none, returned to my armchair full of regret that grandfather had not written a biography instead of a history, for such sincerity, such simplicity, such humility, are qualities that are rarely met with except in masterpieces. Some writers, it is true, have adopted humility as a literary artifice, but grandfather is not aware that he is humble; his prose dreams and unfolds like clouds going by. In speaking of Moore Hall I might have said that it stood on a pleasant green hill, with woods following the winding lake, and attributed the melancholy of the people to their mountains, but my grandfather merely says, In this beautiful place, and the reader's imagination is free to remember the place that has seemed to him the most beautiful. Grandfather is able to accept his own failure without attributing it to circumstances, writing that if his history should gain the applause of those that come after him, it would not matter to him, the grave having closed over him. But we are so made that while we live we think with pleasure that we shall not be forgotten after our death. This feeling, he adds modestly, has been beautifully transcribed in Gibbon's account of his own life. For this modesty and for many other reasons I love my grandfather, and like to think of his life flowing on uneventfully for three or four more years in the pretty library, and then his ashes being carried to Kiltoome, where the applause of the world can never reach him.... But by what right do I publish his preface without his history, perhaps perturbing his rest, for we are not sure that the dead cannot hear us. The Colonel, who has inherited his grandfather's taste for history, should edit the French Revolution. He began reading it, and finding it entertaining, he gave me the preface, remarking that our grandfather had managed to escape notice even in his own house, which was indeed the case. Our mother used to say that when his wife opened the door of his library to consult him, or to make pretence of consulting him regarding the management of his property, he would answer, My dear Louisa, all that you do is right, and on these words the old man would drop back into his meditations.

One's first memory is generally of one's mother, but my grandmother was the first human being that came into my consciousness, a crumpled lady of sixty-five, who introduced me to gingerbread nuts, which, however, she did not allow me to eat. And this incident may have impressed her upon my mind; but now I come to think of it my second memory is of her. She fell one day as she was coming downstairs, and I remember William Mullowney and Joseph Applely carrying her to her room, and from that day onward she lived in two rooms in the charge of nurses, carried out on fine days in a sort of sedan chair. And not only my first and second memories, but my third is of her. I remember my father sitting at a small table writing letters by the bed on which his mother lay. He never spoke of her afterwards. And to me it seems strange not to speak of those we love, but that was my father's way. He never spoke of his mother or his brother Augustus, whom he loved next to his mother, and when I asked him about what books my grandfather had written, he answered, Some histories, leaving me in doubt if he had ever read one of them. But he must have looked into the huge manuscript, for five hundred pounds were left for its publication, and he should have edited it. But my father did not appreciate the old gentleman who wrote histories in the room overlooking the lake; he liked his mother, and all the charming letters that he wrote from school were sent to her, and it was to her, and not to his father, that he sent his Latin and English verses, for between sixteen and seventeen he seems to have had literary ambitions. But as soon as he went to Cambridge he became interested in horses, hounds, and a lady whom he met at Bath. All this the Colonel will write excellently well in his life of our father, for he seems to understand our father's character, though he hardly knew him, and shows a surprising appreciation of the antagonism which arose between mother and son as soon as the son had left school. Our father had inherited his character from her (perhaps that is why he loved her), an obstinate, impetuous character, and he had also inherited from her a taste for letter-writing which followed him through life to the very end, and the letters that mother and son exchanged about the debts the son incurred at Cambridge and about the lady that he wished to marry are very violent, and every quarrel was followed by a violent reconciliation. A time of great storm and stress rolled on until he felt that another quarrel with his mother would be more than he could bear, so he went away to Russia, journeying through the Caucasus, getting to Asia Minor, how, I know not, meditating on the nothingness of things and on suicide as a respite from the torture of existence. His diary breaks off suddenly, to be taken up again two years after; all we know of these two years is that they were spent in the company of a man and his wife ... no doubt the lady he met at Bath, who married soon after my father's flight, and travelled with her husband in the East.

The gentlemen of 1830 all had Byronic adventures, I said, and fell to thinking of the illegitimate daughter that was born to him. My mother told my sister that she had seen the lady; my father had pointed her out, saying, She is my daughter. She married and died childless, an old woman, not very long ago, and it seems a pity, and rather harsh, that we should never have met, for it is quite probable that I might have liked her better than my legitimate relation. There can be no doubt that we should have been great friends, and I pondered the charm of an illegitimate relation, especially a sister, and my father whom I did not recognise in the avowal he is reported to have made to his wife. A reticent man he was, especially reticent about the dead, loquacious only about his journey to the East.... It was probably the part of his life that was most real to him.

After dinner Joseph Applely always brought up tea to the summer room, and my father drank a large cup sitting by a round rosewood table, on which stood a Moderator lamp; and that he did not eat bread and butter or cake with his tea never ceased altogether to surprise me. After tea my mother read a novel in an armchair, and as soon as my toys ceased to interest me I clambered on my father's knee and begged him to tell me stories about the desert and the oases where the caravan had rested on its journey from Palestine to Egypt. My father had been obliged to go to Egypt to get permission to measure the Dead Sea and to survey the coasts, and I listened round-eyed to the tale of how the guides, discovering that the Christian dogs were chalking out the way along the passages inside the Pyramid, threatened to extinguish the torches. His voyage down the Nile was a great delight to me, and between the age of six and seven I was quite familiar with the Blue Nile and the White Nile, and had many times mourned the death of a monkey. The poor little fellow tumbled out of the tree, and putting his hand to his side looked up so plaintively that my father declared that for nothing in the world would he shoot another monkey. The story that I liked best was the bringing of the boat from Joppa on the backs of mules to the Dead Sea, and not satisfied with knowing the story myself, I wished everybody else to hear it, and very often embarrassed my father by insisting that he should tell his visitors that the mules could only totter a few hundred yards, so heavy was the boat, and then had to be changed, and that he had let down eighteen hundred feet of line without touching bottom, the water being so dense that the lead would not sink any farther. And I took care that he should not skip the account of the storm that had arisen and the great fright of the Arabs at the waves; or the explanation that on any other sea except the Dead Sea the boat would certainly have been wrecked. But the best story of all was of a man whom he met walking about some world-renowned ruins with a hammer in his hand. Standing before a statue he would say, You've had that nose on your face for many thousand years, in one second you'll have it no longer. Whack! and away went the nose. No sooner had he finished the tale than he had perforce to tell the story of the merchant who used to go out at nightfall to seek European travellers, and if he saw one who looked as if he had money to spend, he would approach him and whisper in his ear that he if came up a by-street with him he would show him a real Khorassan blade. The celebrated smithies of Damascus had been removed to Khorassan, and the Khorassan blades were being imitated for the European market, and one day the merchant related that he was no longer put to the expense of having new ones made. He had agents in Paris and London, and whenever these imitation swords came into the market they were purchased for small sums and sent out again to be sold after nightfall for large prices. If you can let me have one of these blades, my father answered, I should like to take it home. No, said the crafty Persian, I have none left, but I have a real Khorassan blade which I should very much like to sell you.

Khorassan or imitation I know not, but many swords, scimitars, and daggers were brought back, and Arab bridles looking like instruments of torture; and these were kept in a great press in my nursery, which I was forbidden to open. But a child cannot be gainsaid on his birthday, and my dearest wish was gratified when I was dressed as a Turk, and rode about the estate flourishing a Khorassan blade above the head of my pony. The success of the ride encouraged me to pursue my inquiries into Eastern costumes and customs, and my father's diaries were examined—not the text, that was too difficult for a child, but the camels with which the text was embellished. His eyes were keen, and with a lead pencil, hard and sharp enough to have won all Ruskin's admiration, he followed the long, shaggy, birdlike necks, the tufted and callous hides, and the mobile lips of these bored ruminants, the nonconformists of the four-footed world. The Arab horse never seems to have once tempted his pencil; and it is difficult to find a reason, for he must have had some wonderful horses. He used to tell me of a journey from Jerusalem to Jeddo in a single day; the horse was very tired at the end of it, but he pricked up his ears and began to trot as soon as he caught sight of the town.

The only portrait of a horse that he ever attempted was a large water-colour of Anonymous—a very painstaking piece of work, of which he was a little ashamed, I think, preferring to turn the conversation from the drawing to the race itself. The horse was going very well when he turned a shoe. I wanted him to say that the horse would have won had it not been for the accident, but I could not get him to say that, and remember going to Joseph Applely, a taciturn, clandestine little man whom there is no necessity to describe here, for he is described in Esther Waters under the name of John Randal, to find out the truth—whether Anonymous would have won the Liverpool if he had not turned a shoe. He had done some riding himself, and was disposed to be critical, and he thought—well, it is difficult to remember exactly his criticism of my father's riding, for he had a habit of dropping his voice and muttering to himself in his shirt-collar, mumbling and turning suddenly to his press, that wonderful press in which all things could be found. It was out of that press that Esther Waters came, out of the stable-yard and out of my own heart.

Oscott College had demonstrated, to the satisfaction of my unhappy parent, that it was impossible to teach me to write a clean, intelligible letter, and in despair he allowed me to apply myself to the study of life. At Moore Hall there was no life except the life of the stable-yard, and to it I went with the same appetite with which I went to the life of the studio afterwards; if I had remained at Moore Hall I certainly should have ridden many steeplechases, and perhaps succeeded in doing what my father had failed to do. A pretty indulgence it would be for me now, sitting here, surrounded by Impressionist pictures, to look back upon the day at Liverpool when the flag fell and we raced for the bit of hard ground, numbers of us coming down at the first fence, myself, however, escaping a fall, and then away off into the country ... three miles, over how many fences? And then the jump into the racecourse and the three-quarters of a mile over hurdles. A pretty memory all that long way would have been for a man who has written a line of books, and I should certainly have had some such memory to play with if my father could have restrained himself from asking the electors of Mayo to send him to Parliament to ride for Repeal of the Union. They answered that they would; the horses were sold, and my dream of doing on Slievecarn what my father had hoped to do on Anonymous died in South Kensington, where we had taken a small house at the corner of Alfred Place, opposite South Kensington Station, a pleasant suburb then, thinly populated.

The Exhibition Road was building, and it was at the corner of Prince's Gardens that we met Jim Browne, the painter of the Crucifixion that hangs in Carnacun Chapel, in the roof high above the altar. I can remember him painting in the breakfast-room, and Tom Kelly coming to stand for the figure of Christ. The angels on either side of the cross Jim had painted no doubt out of his head; I had often wondered how he had been able to paint them, and the great picture that my father used to describe to me in the summer room, the great picture entitled the Death of an Indian Chief, a tribe of Indians reining up their horses at the edge of the precipice over which the horse bearing the dead chieftain springs madly into space. The day we met him in the Exhibition Road Jim told my father that he and his sisters were living in Prince's Gardens; he invited us to come and see his pictures on the following Sunday, and during the intervening days I could neither think nor speak of anything but Jim Browne, asking my father all the while why Jim was not the greatest painter in the world since he had painted a tribe of Indians; how many pictures? fifty, sixty, a hundred? He did not think they were so many. Twenty, thirty, forty? And if he could paint so many, why will not the Academy hang his pictures? Are the pictures he paints now not as good as the Death of an Indian Chief? My father suggested that Jim did not finish his pictures sufficiently for the Academy, and tried to explain to me that Jim's drawing was defective. But it was difficult for me then to understand that a man might paint a tribe of Indians reining up their horses at the edge of a precipice and yet not be able to draw, and in bed at night I lay awake thinking, waiting for the day to come.

Father, where is Prince's Gardens? Is it the first turning or the second? Do you think you will be able to persuade Jim Browne to use models? And if he does, will the Academy accept his picture in May?