mmas
everywhere!--and as we ran past the familiar "Brookwood North Camp,"
where white "canvas" shone among the heather (and the heather, the cat
heather, oh SO bonny! with here and there a network of the
red threads of the dodder, so thick that it looked like red flowers),
and all the ladies, young and old, craned forward to see the tents,
etc., I really laughed at myself for the accuracy of my own
descriptions in "Laetus"! P. met us at the R.E. Mess, where we had
luncheon. After lunch we went to the familiar stables, and inspected
the kit for Egypt. Then P. drove us to the Race Course. I met a lot of
old friends. The Duke and Duchess of Connaught were there. It all
looked very pretty, the camp is so much grown up with plantations now.
The air was wondrous sweet. P. drove us back to the Mess for tea, and
then down to the station. It was a great pleasure, though rather a sad
one. Everybody was very grave. A sort of feeling, "What will be the
end?"...

_The Castle, Farnham._
Aug. 17, 1882.

* * * * *

It is one of the sides of X.'s mind which makes me feel her so
_limited_ an artist that she seems almost to take up a school as she
takes up a lady-friend--"one down another come on." I think her abuse
of Wagner now curiously _narrow_. I can't see why one should not feel
the full spell and greater purity of Brahms without dancing in his
honour on Wagner's bones!! It seems like her refusing to see any merit
in, or derive any enjoyment from modern pictures because she has been
"posted" in the Early Italian School. So from year to year these good
people who have been to Florence will not even look at a painting by
Brett or Peter Graham, though by the very qualities and senses through
which one feels the sincerity, the purity, the nobleness, and the fine
colour of those great painters, the photographs of whose pictures even
stir one's heart,--one surely ought also to take delight in a
landscape school which simply did not exist among the ancients. If sea
and sky as GOD spreads them before our eyes are admirable, I
can't think how one can be blind to delight in such pictures as 'The
Fall of the Barometer,' 'The Incoming Tide,' or Leader's 'February
Fill-dyke.' Things which no Florentine ever approached, as transcripts
of Nature's mood apart from man....

Yesterday we had a most delicious drive through the heather and pines
to Crookham. Ah, 'tis a bonny country, and I _did_ laugh when I sai