1891] Morris' Kelmscott Press 55 



took me to see the printing. Morris's own poems were being struck 

 off, most beautiful they are with their rubrics. The sheet I saw be- 

 ing printed contained the Ballad of John a Wood." 



This also of nearly the same date relates to the Kelmscott Press. 

 " Had supper with Morris and his wife and her sister, Miss Burden, 

 and a Mr. Walker [Emery Walker], who helps in the printing work. 

 Morris was busy drawing a title-page for his ' Golden Legend ' and 

 there were some sheets of his new volume of poems, which is to be 

 uniform with the volume he is printing for me. He was immensely 

 pleased when I told him that I had read his ' News from Nowhere,' 

 and that Anne also had read it. He gave an amusing account of an 

 old house ' that that fellow Watts (the painter) had been daubing 

 over. But a coat of whitewash,' he said, ' would soon set that right.' 

 I told him in return about George Wyndham's visit to Swinburne at 

 Putney, a few months ago, when the other Watts, Theodore Watts- 

 Dunton, had insisted on talking politics with him instead of literature, 

 to George's disgust, and how it had ended in Watts reading out his 

 own poems instead of letting Swinburne read his. Watts, George 

 tells me, keeps Swinburne prisoner, as a keeper keeps a lunatic. He 

 had explained to George that some years ago he had found Swinburne 

 in bed, dying of what is called ' drunkard's diarrhcea,' and that having 

 got him round, he now considers Swinburne as his own property, and 

 treats him like a naughty boy, ' a case,' said George, ' for police inter- 

 ference.' Morris was greatly amused at this." 



The month of September saw me in Scotland for a fortnight's 

 grouse shooting at Castle Menzies, which had been rented for the 

 season by my friends the Wagrams, where I had the advantage of 

 meeting a number of French royalists who were staying there to pay 

 their court to the Comte de Paris, who rented a moor close by, the 

 Broglies, the Jaucourts, and the Hautpouls, as well as Count Mens- 

 dorff, afterwards Austrian Ambassador in London. With these I 

 made friends, and also had more than one opportunity of seeing the 

 Comte and Comtesse de Paris and their beautiful daughter, Princess 

 Helene, who was at one time so nearly marrying the heir to our own 

 English throne, and who afterwards married the Duke of Aosta (I 

 had already met her once before at the Wagrams'),. My diary de- 

 scribes the life led by these most worthy Pretenders to the throne of 

 France in their summer Highland home thus : 



' 13th Sept. Sunday. — We drove over to Loch Kinnaird, a lovely 

 place in a fir wood high up on the moors. The house is a wooden one 

 without any kind of pretension. The inside of varnished deal, no 

 upper story, no garden, and no attempt at beautifying inside or out. 

 There we found the Comte de Paris, a lean, bent, grisly-bearded man, 

 on the wrong side of middle age, undistinguished in appearance or 



