PART I 



l888 TO I9OO 



CHAPTER I 



A VISIT TO GREECE IN 1 888 



The year 1888 saw the close of my activities in English public life. 

 How this came about was described in my volume, " The Land War 

 in Ireland." It told how, having fought my battle for Nationalism 

 there and lost it (for my imprisonment had failed to win me the seat 

 in Parliament which alone would have justified me in English eyes for 

 the part I had played in the Celtic quarrel) I resolved to look no more 

 to action at home but to seek in other ways what I still felt to be my 

 mission in life, that of pleading the cause of the backward nations of 

 the world, and especially those of Asia and Africa, from their slavery 

 to Europe. I knew myself to be regarded as a beaten man, and for the 

 moment my depression was extreme. 



Socially, as well as politically, I needed rehabilitation. My " un- 

 patriotic " vagaries, for such they were looked upon, had estranged me 

 from most of my personal friends, my blood relations and those I 

 loved best; nor could I content myself with my new political ac- 

 quaintances or, with the strong instinct I had of the claims of kinship, 

 shift my heart at once to a new hold and break permanently with the 

 society in which I had been bred. All my relations and nearly all my 

 intimate friends were in the Tory camp, and I had no natural footing in 

 any other. With the exception of the Carlisles and the Harcourts, I 

 was at home in none of the great Whig houses, and in my own county 

 of Sussex I stood absolutely alone in my opinions. Nothing can be 

 conceived more dispiriting than the attempts at social entertainment 

 made that Spring in London by the few Liberal peers who had de- 

 clared for Home Rule, unwilling followers of Gladstone. I went with 

 my wife to one of these, at Spencer House, but we found ourselves 

 among strangers and did not go to another. At Crabbet it mattered 

 less, for I was Lord there of my own Manor, cock on my own dunghill, 

 yet I had been shocked by the incongruity of being met at my door on 



