1909] Hall Cainc and Bernard Shaw 273 



am afraid, but the Indians, like the Egyptians, must work out their 

 own salvation, for we cannot let them go on until they break loose, 

 and until defeats and Empire shrinkage in other directions compel us 

 to march out as the Romans marched out of Britain.' Hall Caine, 

 too, writes to me about his new Egyptian novel, ' The White Prophet.' 

 The novel is fantastic, but will do good, as thousands of people will 

 read it. He says in his letter : ' I recall the fact that you kindly sent 

 me " The Wind and the Whirlwind " at the time of its publication. I 

 read your poem again while writing " The White Prophet," and it 

 may possibly occur that certain of my own passages are coloured 

 by yours, etc' Cromer, he says, has been making efforts to influ- 

 ence the Press against his book, and he wants me to write in praise 

 of it. 



" 27th Sept. — Lady Cardigan's Memoirs have been published, a 

 really audacious book, surpassing everything of the kind that has yet 

 been printed. Most of the stories in it relate to things well known 

 in society, but which have only been talked about in private hitherto. 

 There is very little that is new to me. One thing, however, I may 

 say I know to be untrue, the story of Lord Ward's first marriage, 

 though the versions given of it here I have also heard. What I believe 

 really happened (my informant being Mme. d'Usedom, who told it me 

 forty and more years ago) is this: Miss de Burgh, who was a very 

 pretty girl, had four young men who adored her, and who all had 

 proposed to her. Among them were Lord Mount Charles and Lord 

 Ward (afterwards Lord Dudley). There was another, however, whom 

 she really loved, and finding herself with child to him and him unwilling 

 to marry her, she wrote to the others in turn saying that she was now 

 willing, on the sole condition that the wedding should take place at 

 once. Ward accepted her terms and married her, and for some time 

 remained ignorant of how it was with her, but finding it out at last 

 sent her back to her parents, and a separation, not, I think, a divorce, 

 took place. The wife, however, did not long survive it, and having 

 miscarried badly of her child sent to her husband and begged his for- 

 giveness, and he nursed her with all possible kindness to the end. Mme. 

 d'Usedom said this was the account Ward had given her of the affair, 

 and one that, if I remember rightly, Mount Charles had confirmed. 

 Lady Cardigan's story, a very different one, of Ward's brutality was, 

 however, circulated at the time, Ward being a man of strange idiosyn- 

 crasies with women and unpopular with men. She quotes as her au- 

 thority Lady Duppelin, whose husband was one of the lady's lovers 

 and who doubtless got it through him from the lady — not a very re- 

 iable source. The occasion on which I heard my version was when 

 I was staying with Mme. d'Usedom at S. Maurice in Switzerland in 

 1867, Lord Dudley being at the time on his second honeymoon there. 



