“After repeated promises of place from the present Government, I am put off with an offer so small and contemptible that I answered it by indignant refusal.
“The Yankees have come to something like—but not exactly—a definite offer. If it be put in a real, tangible, and unevasive way I shall accept, pitching my friends the Tories to the winds.
“Have you read ‘D. D.’ and ‘Fitzgerald’? If so, what do you say to them?”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Spezzia, Aug. 10, 1858.
“I cannot tell you how gratified I was by what you say of ‘Cro-Martin.’ Independently of all a man’s natural misgivings about his own failing powers, it is unspeakably encouraging to be judged favourably by one’s oldest and best of friends, whose true-heartedness would not suffer him to flatter or say more than he felt. I know—I feel—that my old vein is worked out. I am as much aware of it as I am of scanty hair and the fifty other signs of age about me, but I don’t despair of finding other shafts to work, and of making my knowledge of life and mankind available,—even though I have lost the power to make my books droll or laughable.
“We have come down here for the bathing to the most beautiful spot on the Mediterranean, and are boating and swimming to our heart’s content,—everything but working, which really I cannot do in this most fascinating of all idling localities.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Casa Capponi, Florence, Nov. 1,1858.
“Yesterday I had a civil note from Lord Malmesbury stating that the regulation for consular appointments required that no candidate should be above fifty, and all should submit to a rigid examination. He saw no better means of introducing me into ‘the line’ than by creating for me a vice-consulate at a place I am much attached to—Spezzia. The rule as to age and examination did not apply to vice-consular appointments nor to their promotion, so that once a V.-C. I can be advanced, if opportunity serve, to something worth having. Spezzia will not be £300 a-year; but as I like the place, and there is nothing—actually nothing—to do, I have thought it best to accept it. In fact, to refuse would be to exclude myself totally from all hope of F. O. patronage, and this I did not deem wise to do. The whole negotiation is yet secret, and until I am gazetted I wish it to remain so. The consulship at Naples is what I look to, and what, if negotiations should open to a renewal of relations there, I might hope to obtain.