FLOWERMEAD, PRINCES ROAD, WIMBLEDON PARK, S.W. (JAN., 1920).
DEAR MRS. ASQUITH,
A bird in the air had already whispered the matter of your literary venture, and I neither had nor have any doubt at all that the publisher knew very well what he was about. The book will be bright in real knowledge of the world; rich in points of life; sympathetic with human nature, which in strength and weakness is never petty or small.
Be sure to TRUST YOURSELF; and don't worry about critics. You need no words to tell you how warmly I am interested in your great design. PERSEVERE.
How kind to bid me to your royal [Footnote: I invited him to meet the Prince of Wales.] meal. But I am too old for company that would be so new, so don't take it amiss, my best of friends, if I ask to be bidden when I should see more of YOU. You don't know how dull a man, once lively, can degenerate into being.
Your always affectionate and grateful
J. MORLEY.
To return to my triumphant youth: I will end this chapter with a note which my friend, Lady Frances Balfour—one of the few women of outstanding intellect that I have known—sent me from her father, the late Duke of Argyll, the wonderful orator of whom it was said that he was like a cannon being fired off by a canary.
Frances asked me to meet him at a small dinner and placed me next to him. In the course of our conversation, he quoted these words that he had heard in a sermon preached by Dr. Caird:
"Oh! for the time when Church and State shall no longer be the watchword of opposing hosts, when every man shall be a priest and every priest shall be a king, as priest clothed with righteousness, as king with power!"