252 Yeats on Rhymed Verse [ I 9°9 



is extraordinarily well preserved, whether by nature or art. They 

 stayed on chattering the little banalities of Court conversation for 

 half-an-hour with the German accent Lady Gregory imitated well. At 

 the theatre we found Yeats, who talked to us between the acts. He 

 told me he had been converted to my use of the Alexandrine metre 

 for plays in verse, but that he had such a difficulty in finding rhymes 

 that a rhymed play would take him two years to write. The pieces 

 we saw given were ' Devorgilla ' and the ' Playboy of the Western 

 World.' The ' Playboy,' I fancy, must have been a bit bowdlerized 

 from the original version, or else it was not very intelligible to an 

 English audience, but certainly here in London it seemed a very harm- 

 less bit of broad farce which could shock no one. The Irish of it was 

 such that a good deal of the dialogue was difficult to catch. I found 

 it immensely amusing and quite admirably acted. The principal girl's 

 part was done by a sister of Sarah Allgood, who had been engaged to 

 Synge. Of Sarah Allgood herself I thought less, she was more con- 

 ventional. The house was half empty, and there was little encour- 

 agement given to the actors. Yeats is beginning to get fat and sleek; 

 he has cut his hair and his cheeks have a pink colour, and he is well 

 dressed, as a prosperous theatrical manager should be. 



" 22nd June. — George Wyndham came. He is rather out of it just 

 now in Parliament as he takes no very strong interest in the Budget 

 dispute, believing the Radical bark to be worse than the bite. I do not 

 expect the Lords will reject the Budget, as some of the extremists would 

 have them do. In regard to the land they would be on firm ground, 

 for the Radical view on the land question is essentially unsound, unless 

 the full Socialist doctrine be admitted, la propriete c'est le vol. 



" To the Tate Gallery, which has revived in me many old memories. 

 The Vernon Collection, which I remember in Marlborough House 

 when I first came to London in 1856, and used constantly to visit, the 

 early pre-Raphaelite pictures, most of which I saw about the same time 

 hung in the Academy, and numbers more. It is wonderful how they 

 have improved with age, or is it with pictures as it is with a sonnet, 

 which seems better if one has once known it by heart and half forgotten. 



" 24th June. — Some Persians called on me, introduced by Rothstein, 

 poor helpless people, knowing hardly a word of any language but their 

 own and Russian. They had come to London to try and enlist Eng- 

 lish sympathy for their Constitutional cause. 



" 2%th June — Halil Halid and Meynell dined with me. Halil has 

 been with Mukhtar Pasha since his stay of three days in England as 

 Extraordinary Ambassador, but he had very little to tell me, being 

 affected with pseudo diplomatic reserve, except that the question of 

 Egypt was not raised or mentioned by Mukhtar. Cromer, he tells 



