Preface ix 



connected with the Darwinian discussions of the day, allusions to 

 which will be found in the diaries. 



"From Frankfort he was transferred in 1863 to Madrid and in the 

 following year to the Paris Embassy, just then at the full height of 

 the short lived glory of the Second Napoleonic Empire. Here the 

 romantic follies of his youth began and with them the first out- 

 pourings of his poetic faculty followed by a diplomatic exile to the 

 remoter posts in the service — to the Legations of Portugal and the 

 River Plate. On his return to Europe he married Lady Anna- 

 bella Noel, the only daughter of William Earl of Lovelace and of Ada 

 Byron, that child of romance to whom the poet Byron addressed those 

 pathetic lines : "Ada, sole daughter of my house and heart" ; and 

 the year after on the death of his elder brother he left the diplomatic 

 service and settled down to a country life on his ancestral acres. There 

 he and his highly gifted wife busied themselves for some half dozen 

 years, she with painting, he with sculpture, and in secret with 

 those verses which afterwards were to become so celebrated as "The 

 Sonnets of Proteus," and both in the rebuilding of their family home, 

 Crabbet Park, a work for which they were their own sole architects. 



"In 1875 tiring of too inadventurous a life at home, a sudden impulse 

 started them on a series of romantic horseback journeys in Spain, 

 Algeria and Asia Minor, and eventually in that still wilder wandering 

 in Mesopotamia, Persia and the as yet quite unvisited regions of 

 Central Arabia." 



It was in 1881 that my first meeting with him and Lady Anne took 

 place, at Cairo, when they were living in the garden they had bought 

 on the desert edge of Heliopolis ; and at that meeting my husband had 

 told us how some years before at a bull fight at Madrid he had been 

 struck by the extraordinary good looks of the young matador awaiting 

 the rush of the bull in the arena and asking who he was heard he was 

 an attache from the English Embassy, Wilfrid Blunt. That fine 

 poem of his on the dying bull fighter Sancho Sanchez shows perhaps 

 the hidden root of that adventure: 



"Meaning was there in our courage and the calm of our demeanour, 

 For there stood a foe before us which had need of all our skill, 

 And our lives were as the programme, and the world was our arena, 

 And the wicked beast was death and the horns of death were Hell. 



"And the boast of our profession was a bulwark against danger 

 With its fearless expectation of what good or ill may come, 

 For the very prince of darkness shall burst forth on us no stranger 

 When the doors of death fly open to the rolling of the drum. " 



