Welcombe, Stratford on Avon. - Good to read about Julian's 'encounter with country things' [see 46/230]. The people around Stratford who 'profess to be weather-wise', and perhaps are so, say that after a long winter like this, Spring will come very quickly and be 'fruitful'; true that he has never admired the daffodils so much. Caroline was saying she 'always has the cadence of the Bruce-Logan cuckoo [a poem attributed to both John Logan and Michael Bruce] in her ears; [John?] Bright always recited it to them at 'his annual dinner - no other guest, and a fruit table, by special request - at 30 Ennismore Gardens'. They have finished reading "The Grasshoppers" [by Cecily Sidgwick] which is am 'admirable novel', and are about to begin Gosse's "Life" of Swinburne. Interested to hear Elizabeth's opinion of [Walter Scott's] "Guy Mannering" and 'Hatteraick's language' [in that novel]; expects it was 'good enough for Scott's readers', and it is 'as like Dutch' as the 'serious conversation in "Old Mortality"' which Sir George has been reading to Mary Caroline was to 'the language which Morton and Edith must have talked'.
Wallington, Cambo, Morpeth. - Asks Robert if he knows the whereabouts of a copy of [Dickens's] "Barnaby Rudge", and the "Harrow Atlas of Ancient Geography" which he very much misses; has found an entry in the list of lent books indicating that Robert had these, but the initials have been crossed out. Has just finished Conrad's "Rescue"; seems a 'strange delusion' that people consider him out of the ordinary, and rank him with writers such as 'Arnold Bennett, Wells, Mrs Sidgwick, Shaw, Kipling, and Stevenson'; he is of course clever, 'but he does not know how to tell a plain, or an impassioned story'; read "Chance" aloud to Caroline, which amused him despite 'the upside down of the narrative', but can read nothing else of his with pleasure. Sends birthday wishes.