By what felicity of divination were you inspired to send me a few
days ago that wonderful diary under its lock and key?--feeling so
rightly certain, I mean, of the peculiar degree and particular
PANG of interest that I should find in it? I don't wonder, indeed,
at your general presumption to that effect, but the mood, the
moment, and the resolution itself conspired together for me, and I
have absorbed every word of every page with the liveliest
appreciation, and I think I may say intelligence. I have read the
thing intimately, and I take off my hat to you as to the very
Balzac of diarists. It is full of life and force and colour, of a
remarkable instinct for getting close to your people and things
and for squeezing, in the case of the resolute portraits of
certain of your eminent characters, especially the last drop of
truth and sense out of them--at least as the originals affected
YOUR singularly searching vision. Happy, then, those who had, of
this essence, the fewest secrets or crooked lives to yield up to
you--for the more complicated and unimaginable some of them
appear, the more you seem to me to have caught and mastered them.
Then I have found myself hanging on your impression in each case
with the liveliest suspense and wonder, so thrillingly does the
expression keep abreast of it and really translate it. This and
your extraordinary fullness of opportunity, make of the record a
most valuable English document, a rare revelation of the human
inwardness of political life in this country, and a picture of
manners and personal characters as "creditable" on the whole (to
the country) as it is frank and acute. The beauty is that you
write with such authority, that you've seen so much and lived and
moved so much, and that having so the chance to observe and feel
and discriminate in the light of so much high pressure, you