1908] Grey Refuses to Sec Farid 203 



Government honest in their profession of eventual evacuation?' Un- 

 less Grey can give some new public assurance on this head, it is useless 

 discussing details. The latest pronouncement has been Cromer's, that 

 ' Egypt cannot be made self-governing under three or four genera- 

 tions,' let us say never. As long as there is a doubt about this, all 

 Egyptians will be banded together against England. Farid gives much 

 the same account of the Khedive Abbas's attitude toward the National 

 movement as Mustapha Kamel did. His Highness talks one thing to 

 one man, another to another. He is friends with Gorst and Cassel, 

 who help him to make money. 



" 30th May. — Grey has refused to see Farid on the ground that he 

 also refused to see Kamel. Redmond writes to me about it. In it he 

 says: ' I had an interview with Sir Edward Grey this morning (about 

 his seeing Farid) and he states that when Mustapha Kamel Pasha was 

 over here as the leader of the Nationalist Party he declined to see him, 

 and that under these circumstances he cannot see his way to see his 

 successor.' This is marked private. 



" Cockerell has got the place of Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum 

 at Cambridge. 



" 6th June. — I have been extremely ill for the last three weeks, 

 threatened with I know not what, needing an operation in my throat, 

 which I have refused, preferring to die a natural death. In the after- 

 noon Meynell arrived, having been all the morning with Archbishop 

 Bourne. Bourne, he tells me, was at one time curate to Monsignor 

 Denis at West Grinstead, and knew Newbuildings well in John Pollen's 

 time, and he remembers having met me at one of the Capuchin festivals 

 at Crawley. His (Bourne's) position, in regard to Modernism is, 

 contrary to what I imagined, one of disapproving the Papal Encyclical 

 as unnecessary in England and ill-timed, and this, Meynell says, is the 

 general opinion regarding it, so much so that Wilfrid Ward has been 

 able to persuade the Duke of Norfolk to write in that sense to the 

 Pope. The Pope, curiously enough, is believed to be himself not so 

 violent against Modernists as might be supposed from the public 

 pronouncements. Who then is the causa causans? 



" Meynell has just been to see Francis Thompson's sister, the nun at 

 Manchester. He describes her as an enthusiastic, impulsive creature, 

 who kissed his hands when she saw him and sat for hours talking about 

 her brother's early life. 



" ytli June. — The crisis of my illness is over. My doctor, when he 

 arrived, remarked cheerfully, ' Well, we have saved you this time from 

 the surgeon's hands ! ' Nature has operated its own cure, but doctors 

 will be doctors. E. V. Lucas and his wife came for the afternoon, 

 very nice people, he the author of ' Wisdom while you wait.' I have 

 spent the afternoon talking pleasantly with Meynell about Thompson's 



