good, and I was swayed backwards and forwards in regard to her Imperial position by opposing hopes and fears. It was not till I had cleared my thoughts by putting them into print that I gradually came to any settled plan.
One great pre-occupation, too, I had that year in the establishment of my stud of Arab horses at Crabbet, about which I was in constant correspondence with the world of sport, including a public one with the Jockey Club.
Curiously enough, it was in connection with my views on horseflesh that I first came into epistolary communication with Mr. Gladstone.
His well-known hobby about ancient Greece had made him curious to learn my opinion about the horses of antiquity, and especially the probable breeding of those of Greece and Troy; and a message was conveyed to me through Mr. Knowles, the editor of the "Nineteenth Century Review," asking a memorandum on their genealogy.
This, and the accident of his naming Edward Hamilton, with whom I was intimate, his private secretary when he took office in April in succession to Disraeli, were the links which led to our correspondence later on Egyptian affairs.
A few extracts from a fragmentary journal I began to keep in 1880 will show the chaos of ideas, literary, social, and political in which during that year, I lived. The extracts are only such as have some relation to Eastern affairs, and I find them embedded in a mass of notes recording events of private and ephemeral interest no longer of any value. The first gives a picture of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, for so many years our Ambassador at Constantinople, and who was now living in retirement and extreme old age with his two daughters on the borders of Kent and Sussex: