212 Alfred Austin Laureate [1896 



charging 'the Sultan with all sorts of crimes, and appealing to the 

 Khedive to occupy Nejd. He had had to give him ' a piece of his 

 mind * and tell him that if he meddled with politics and the Sultan 

 heard of it and demanded his extradition, he should not interfere to 

 protect him; if he wanted to talk Arabian poli'tics he had better go 

 to Bagdad. 



" We also discussed the appointment of Alfred Austin to the post 

 of Poet Laureate. He, Cromer, thought William Watson would have 

 been better. The Empress Frederick had 'tried to get Rennell Rodd 

 appointed. He had never heard of Austin. Indeed, Austin's appoint- 

 ment is a ridiculous one, for, with the exception of three sonnets, 

 Austin has never written anything in the smallest degree good. His 

 sole claim is that he has been a solid supporter of the Conservative 

 party in the press. I remember him well as a young man about thirty- 

 eight years ago, when he first came up to London and published his ear- 

 liest verses, ' The Season, a Satire,' and the rest. Some of them rather 

 smart. He was a Catholic and moved in a small way in Catholic soci- 

 ety, but later married an Irish Protestant and, I believe, joined the 

 English church. He was the most absurd little cock sparrow of a 

 man ever seen, and childishly vain of his talents. He has improved 

 with years, but not in his verses. His principal poem, ' Madonna's 

 Child,' is about the dullest and silliest tale in meagre blank verse ever 

 produced. He has floated in at last to the Laurea'teship on the suc- 

 cess of a prose volume about his garden in Kent. There really was no 

 choice, however, for the post. William Morris refused, the Queen ob- 

 jected to Swinburne, old Patmore was a Catholic, the rest were, if pos- 

 sible, worse than Austin. He is better anyhow 'than Lewis Morris, the 

 Liberal candidate, or than Watson, Dobson, Davidson, and the rest of 

 the sons of their own penny trumpets. 



" gth Jan. — The German Emperor has telegraphed his congratula- 

 tions to Kruger, and this seems to have produced great anger in Eng- 

 land. We have now managed in the last six months to quarrel violently 

 with China, Turkey, Belgium, Ashanti, France, Venezuela, America, 

 and Germany. This is a record performance, and if it does not break 

 up the British Empire nothing will. For myself I am glad of it all, 

 for the British Empire is the great engine of evil for the weak races 

 now existing in the world — not that we are worse than the French 

 or Italians or Americans — indeed, we are less actively destructive — 

 but we do it over a far wider area and more successfully. I should 

 be delighted to see England stripped of her whole foreign possessions. 

 We were better off and more respected in Queen Elizabeth's time, the 

 ' spacious days,' when we had not a stick of territory outside the British 

 Islands, than now, and infinitely more respectable. The gangrene of 

 colonial rowdyism is infecting us, and the habit of repressing liberty 



