1909] Cardinal Newman's "Loss and Gain" 233 



" Conny Lytton has been arrested with other suffragettes, and is 

 to-night in Holloway gaol. She has led a hermit's life at home for the 

 last fifteen years, seldom going away from her fireside, nor from her 

 mother's wing, now she suddenly takes up this suffrage question in its 

 most violent form. 



" I hear from Lady C. that the poor King is really very ill, though 

 they do all they can to hide it. The present attack they say dates from 

 his visit to the Kaiser Wilhelm at Berlin, caused by wearing a Prussian 

 uniform too tight at the throat. 



" 1st March. — I have been reading Newman's ' Loss and Gain,' which 

 I read years ago, but had forgotten. In style I think it quite perfect, 

 having the same sort of quiet humour one finds in Jane Austen's 

 novels, but even more subdued. The characters are admirably drawn, 

 and justify themselves in speech and action in a way so many novelists 

 miss, including Meredith ; thus it continues to interest one in spite 

 of its strangely out-of-date controversial Theology. Newman's mind, 

 at any rate in his Oxford days, seems never to have faced the real 

 issues of belief and unbelief, those which have to be fought out with 

 materialism, yet the book was published less than a dozen years before 

 Darwin's ' Origin of Species.' What a gulf separates us f r om that 

 time, the epoch of undoubting belief in the literal inspiration of the 

 Holy Scriptures. It seems difficult to realize the time when the best 

 and sanest minds in England were arguing about the Apostolical Suc- 

 cession and the Councils of the early Church, unconscious of the wider 

 issues about to be opened, just as they were at Constantinople about 

 the Procession of the Holy Ghost, while Sultan Mahmud was ham- 

 mering at the gates. 



" $th March. — Chapel Street. Frank Lascelles lunched with me, 

 and we had a pleasant talk about old times. He has seen much lately 

 of the King, having been at. Sandringham and Windsor, and constantly 

 asked to meet his Majesty at dinner and play bridge with him. He 

 gives the same account of the King's short temper that Lady C. did, 

 and of the language he uses to his partners when the cards go wrong. 

 I asked him whether the King was a good player, and he said, ' Oh no, 

 when he has a good hand with his dummy he knows how to make 

 the best of it, but he has no knowledge of where the unseen cards 

 c hould be.' The King is off to-day to Biarritz, and I gather that there 

 is something seriously the matter with his throat. Frank talked highly 

 of the King's knowledge of Foreign politics, and of his tact and skill 

 in dealing with them. Cromer was Frank's subordinate in Egypt in 

 1879, and he told me that meeting Cromer the other day, he had 

 remarked, ' I suppose we shall be having the Emperor William talking 

 again in a few days, it seems impossible to make him hold his tongue.' 

 Frank's reply hit Cromer hard : 'Yes, as impossible as it is to make you 



