326 Krugeft at Bloemfontein [1899 



the Cathedral to see the Burne-Jones Morris windows. Prayers were 

 going on for the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the Houses of Par- 

 liament, and they were intoning, ' Give peace in our time, O Lord.' 

 Then we dined in the hall, and talked with two Dons, Myers and an- 

 other, about Eastern travel and horses, till I got away to bed. 



"21st June. — Lane will publish ' Satan Absolved.' 



" 28th June. — Herbert Spencer consents to have ' Satan Absolved ' 

 dedicated to him, but is in a terrible fright lest it should be found out 

 that he gave the idea of the poem, ' on account,' he says, ' of the odium 

 theologicum and the injury it might do to the spread of his philosophy,' 

 so I have written a preface without exactly saying this, though it is not 

 very courageous of him to leave me alone in the coming battle. 



" 29th June. — Breakfasted with George and Sibell, who showed me 

 two very interesting letters from her son Bendor, describing the inter- 

 view between Kruger and his chief, Milner (whose private secretary 

 he is) at Bloemfontein. The letters were written actually during the 

 conference, and contained sketches of old Kruger, whom he described 

 as very old and infirm, and also very sly. He talked of Kruger as 

 ' bluffing.' He writes with a boy's enthusiasm for his chief, and seems 

 to be enjoying himself greatly. I showed George my preface to ' Satan 

 Absolved,' which he thinks cannot fail to attract attention. 



" On my way home by the late train I travelled as far as Dorking 

 with Harry Cust. I gave him my view of the way the Transvaal 

 quarrel had been engineered by Chamberlain and Milner. He pro- 

 fessed to regard this as the extreme of political scepticism. ' A poet,' 

 he said, ' should not be so unbelieving in honesty.' He was on his way 

 down to Admiral Maxse's, where he was to meet Meredith and others. 



" 8//z July. — Our annual Arab Sale, an immense concourse of peo- 

 ple, 380 sitting clown for luncheon in the tent. Colonel Sdanovitch our 

 principal buyer for the Russian Government. 



"8th Aug. — I have been staying for the last few weeks at Fernycroft, 

 but to-day I went to London, where I found Hampden at my rooms in 

 Mount Street. He has been living there all the last month. We went 

 in the evening to see the Savage South African Show. It is a return 

 to the shows of Imperial Rome, minus the bloodshed, and is worth 

 seeing as a spectacle, though it is monstrous to look on at these captives 

 brought to London to make a Roman holiday. The white swaggerers 

 who are given the beau role to play in the exhibition are of course dis- 

 gusting, but the black men managed to preserve their dignity and make 

 the others look foolish. The superiority of the black man over the 

 white was throughout conspicuous, and it did not need the patter of the 

 whites on the stage to explain that it was only their maxim guns that 

 gave the latter their victory." 



From 9th August to 16th August I was at Fernycroft, my new ac- 



