1891] The Society of "The Souls" 53 



is not very hopeful of its ever coming true. I am determined now to get 

 on with my ' Secret History of the Invasion of Egypt,' so as to have it 

 ready for publication when Gladstone comes back to office. My old 

 friend, too, Eddy Hamilton, I saw. I found him occupying the ground 

 floor rooms of No. 10, Downing Street. His sitting room is that in 

 which the Cabinet Councils have always been held, and many a scurvy 

 decision been come to in the last hundred years." Hamilton was now 

 permanent official head of the Treasury, and the rooms had been lent 

 him by Lord Salisbury who did not occupy them. He was suffering, 

 however, with the disease, creeping paralysis, of which some years later 

 he died, and we did not talk much on Egypt or on politics. 



In my disappointment about Egypt I turned with redoubled zest to 

 my social pleasures of the year before, and at this time saw much of 

 that interesting group of clever men and pretty women known as the 

 " Souls," than whom no section of London Society was better worth 

 frequenting, including as it did all that there was most intellectually 

 amusing and least conventional. It was a group of men and women 

 bent on pleasure, but pleasure of a superior kind, eschewing the vul- 

 garities of racing and card-playing indulged in by the majority of the 

 rich and noble, and looking for their excitement in romance and senti- 

 ment. But this is not the place in which to describe the life we led, 

 though it well deserves being eternalized in print. It harmonized well 

 with my literary work, and the verses I was preparing for a new edi- 

 tion of the " Sonnets and Songs of Proteus." This William Morris 

 had proposed to print as one of the earliest volumes of the Kelmscott 

 Press, and I was much with him in connection with it. 



" 10th June. — There is a great turmoil in the papers about Lord 

 Salisbury's Treaty or Agreement with Italy in 1887. It appears now 

 that King Humbert told Prince Napoleon about it, and at last it has 

 come out. This coincides with the change of policy in Egypt, and the 

 determination to remain there." [This Agreement, which has never 

 been officially admitted by our Foreign Office, related to an intended 

 seizure by Italy of Tripoli, and a promise that England would help 

 Italy if it led to a quarrel between her and France. The reality of the 

 agreement, however, has since been acknowledged by Crispi in his 

 Memoirs.] 



To London in the evening and dined in Park Lane (a small dinner 

 arranged by George Wyndham, in which I was to meet Arthur Balfour 

 and bury the hatchet with him of our Irish quarrel). The party con- 

 sisted of George and his wife, Lady Clifden's daughter, Miss Ellis, 

 Mrs. Hardinge, Lord Edmund Talbot, Bo Grosvenor (Lord Ebury), 

 Charles Gatty, with Balfour and me. It was a pleasant party, and 

 after the ladies had left we stayed on talking till past one o'clock. I 

 had not met Balfour since my Irish campaigning, and we did not talk 



