Such is the history faithfully and fully told of the part I played that winter in Egypt. In telling it I have relied for the accuracy of my memory of the main incidents on such letters and short notes as I have been able to find among my papers, and especially on an account of it drawn up by me while the war of 1882 was in progress, and published in the September number of the "Nineteenth Century Review" of that year. Of this, my present memoir is little more than an amplification. What follows will be comparatively new matter, for though most of it has long been written in a disjointed way, I have never found a moment suited to its completion. For dates and incidents, however, I am supplied with ample materials of a contemporary value, first in a brief diary which from the time of my arrival in England I now once more regularly kept, and next in the many published and unpublished letters still in my possession, which passed between me and various public personages with whom I had found myself in correspondence during the four months which elapsed between my arrival in England and the bombardment of Alexandria; and again after Tel-el-Kebir with those who on my behalf were conducting Arabi's trial. These form a body of evidence which I shall quote where needful, either in the text of my narrative or in an appendix to it. Taken together, with the necessary thread of explanation, they of themselves form an almost complete history of the causes of the war.
The political situation which I found on my arrival, 6th March, in London, was a wonderful contrast to that which I had left behind me a week before at Cairo. Gladstone had been now nearly two years in office, and the enthusiasm for Eastern nationalities and Eastern liberty, which at