191 1 ] Duse Mohammed 345 



with more knowledge than sympathy in Indian things, and no sympathy 

 at all with modern India. 



"25th March. — Dillon lunched with me to concert measures about 

 ' Egypt,' which seems to have been put on the official black list at 

 Cairo. I am off now to Newbuildin^s till after Easter. 



"26th March (Sunday). — Newbuildings. Belloc came to dinner 

 with Maurice Baring. Baring is intelligent and pleasant, but showed 

 no extraordinary brilliancy in talk. 



"nth April. — Moberley Bell's and Alfred Lyall's deaths are an- 

 nounced to-day. Bell I never knew personally, but Lyall was for 

 many years my friend. He died suddenly of angina pectoris at Far- 

 ringford, where he was staying, apparently in good health, at the age 

 of seventy-six. He had a successful Anglo-Indian official life, and 

 twenty years ago was much cherished in London society ; but, as old 

 people are obliged to do, had dropped out of it laterly, and we had not 

 met for the last eight or nine years. Without being a poet, he wrote 

 some good verse, and had much knowledge of the East with as great 

 sympathy for it as an Indian official dared to show. 



" 12th April. — Laid the foundation stone of my new Manor House 

 in Worth Forest. 



" i8^/z- April. — George Howard Lord Carlisle is dead. He was one 

 of the best of men, as well as one of the most domestically tried. 



" igth April. — Newbuildings. One Duse Mohammed, who has 

 written a good book on Egypt, cribbed, nearly all of it, from me and 

 Rothstein, came to see me. He is an odd creature, an Egyptian mulatto, 

 he says, but knowing no word of Arabic ; a Mohammedan, but unable to 

 recite the formula of the faith; an Egyptian historian with almost no 

 knowledge of Egypt. He tells me he was circumcised a Mohammedan, 

 that his name is properly Mohammed Ali Ibn Abd El Salaam, but was 

 taken to England by a Frenchman named Ducey when he was ten years 

 old, and has only once been in Egypt since, namely from May 1882 

 till February 1883, when he returned to England. There he went on 

 the stage, and later in America, lecturing on Shakespeare and writing 

 for the Press. To test him I tried whether he could recite the Fatha, 

 but he was unable to so much as repeat the words after me. It re- 

 minds one of the Tichborne claimant, who, asserting that he had been 

 brought up a Catholic, was unable to repeat the ' Hail Mary.' He has 

 married an English woman and goes sometimes to church, but has al- 

 ways refused, he tells me, to be baptized. 



"22nd April. — The French Government seems drifting into an in- 

 vasion of Morocco, just as Gladstone drifted into invading Egypt in 

 1882. Our fine Liberals here are all applauding out of ' loyalty to 

 France ' ; this is their thieves' honour. 



" 2$th April. — Rothstein is furious about Duse Mohammed's ap- 



