My Diaries Author:Wilfrid Scawen Blunt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II EGYPT UNDER TEWFIK, I The summer of 1889 saw me occupied almost exclusively with literary work. It was then that I wrote my poem, " A New Pilgri... more »mage," which with many other pieces of more or less the same date I published in the early autumn. This brought me once more into pleasant relations with my friends, even those who had been most angry with me for my doings in Ireland. Chief among these was my cousin, George Wynd- ham, who already the year before had sent me a pleasant word. " We have so many grounds," he wrote, " for friendship, our common love of sport and of poetry, and especially our common blood, that I think it would be very foolish to allow differences of politics and opinion to interfere with it in any way. I sincerely hope that you think so too." Now, on my return to England in 1889, I found him full of affectionate endeavour to make things pleasant for me on my re- emergence into social life. In this he showed himself no idle friend. I had hardly arrived in London when he arranged occasions of meeting for me at his house in Park Lane with our mutual friends, and eventually one with Arthur Balfour, at which we buried our political hatchet in mutual amiabilities, an attitude we have ever since preserved as often as we have met. Another friend, equally dear to me with George, whom I recovered at this time, was Lytton. He, too, had written me an affectionate letter, regretting that he had missed seeing me on my passage through Paris. As to my women friends, my prison adventures, I soon found, had done me no real discredit with them. The only one of them that had been seriously shocked at it was Princess Wagram, who, not being English, had made herself more English in the matter than were my own countrywomen, and now she, too, was reconciled. With the ...« less