2110-3-7-22

STOCKS COTTAGE, TRING.

April 8 1920

My dear John

Your letter has come and I am most grateful to you - it is very kind of you to have written so fully and your advice is just what I wanted. It may interest you to know that I had already, on reflection, come to the conclusion (I told Sarah) that the things were essentially reviews and that, unless you took the opposite view very decidedly indeed, I should give up the idea of publishing them.

Meanwhile your generous remarks about the article gives me great

[in margin:] of your hospitable suggestion about Elsfield. It would be delightful to come to you there. Yrs ever faithfully. Thanks again.

John Bailey

pleasure, I need not say. I expect the friend speaks in them rather than the critic or the publisher but after all the praise of one's friends is in many ways the pleasantest there is. I shall bear your suggestion in mind. Perhaps I might make a book of studies in the chief figures in English political history and incorporate some of the material of those articles.

What a confounded bore this weather is! The sun shone gorgeously every day so long as one walked the London streets and now that one is in this splendid country it either rains or, as today, is such a fog that one can hardly see fifty yards.

We will certainly avail ourselves