thright, or sell it for Hog'swash,
because it involves the endurance of some pain, and the exercise of
some faith and hope and charity! _Mehalah_ is a well-written book,
with a delicious sense of local colour in nature. And it is (pardon
the sacrilege!) a LOVE _story_! The focus point of the hero's
(!) desire would at quarter sessions, or assizes, go by the plain
names of outrage and murder, and he succeeds in drowning himself with
the girl who hates him lashed to him by a chain. In not one other
character of the book is there an indication that life has an aim
beyond the lusts of the flesh, and the most respectable characters are
the tenants whose desires are summed up in the desire of more suet
pudding and gravy!! To any one who KNOWS the poor! who knows
what faiths and hopes (true or untrue) support them in consumption and
cancer, in hard lives and dreary deaths, the picture is as untrue as
it is (to me!) disgusting.

* * * * *

March 22, 1882.

* * * * *

On Saturday night I went down with A. and L. to Battersea, to one of
the People's Concerts. I enclose the programme. It is years since I
have enjoyed anything so much as _Thomas's_ Harp-playing. (He is not
Ap-Thomas, but he _is_ the Queen's Harper.) His hands on those strings
were the hands of a _Wizard_, and form and features nearly as quaint
as those of Mawns seemed to dilate into those of a poet. It was very
marvellous.

Did I tell you that Lady L. has sent _me_ a ticket this year for her
Sunday afternoons at the Grosvenor? We went on Sunday. The paintings
there just now are Watts's. Our old blind friend at Manchester has
sent a lot. It is a very fine collection. I think few paintings do
beat Watts's 'Love and Death'--Death, great and irresistible, wrapped
in shrowd-like drapery, is pushing relentlessly over the threshold of
a home, where the portal is climbed over by roses and a dove plays
about the lintel. You only see his back. But, facing you, Love, as a
young boy, torn and flushed with passion and grief, is madly striving
to keep Death back, his arms strained, his wings crushed and broken in
the unequal struggle.

Beside the paintings it was great fun seeing the company! Princess
Louise was there, and lots of minor stars. And--my Welsh Harper was
there! I had a long chat with him. He talks like a true artist, and
WE must know him hereafter. When I said that when I heard him
play the