“Sir Bulwer Lytton is graciously pleased to be pleased with ‘Tony,’ and condescends to ask Blackwood, Who writes it? Some compensation this, for a friend now here told me he turned it over, but though it wasn’t positively bad, it was not ‘tempting.’ Happily it takes all sorts of folk to make a public—as well as a world.
“I believe Julia sent you down a book of mine this morning. If ‘The Times’ does not reach regularly, it is because it misses here at least every second day.
“Write to me. Tell me that you are well and the Hôtel d’Odessa empty, that the climate agrees with Mrs Burbidge, and that Bassetti has the ague.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Casa Capponi, Florence, November.
“Do not cut down T. B.,—it would certainly damage him, and I’ll not fail you, so far at least as time is concerned. What you tell me of the opinions of him cheers me much.
“I wrote you a line about Turkey, and now it seems to be that a droll series of short papers might be well devised—Mr Kenny Dodd upon ‘Men and Things in General,’—a light [survey] taken from an Irish point of view, and consequently as often wrong as right. Next year will be a stirring one here—that is, over the Continent, and afford plenty of passing events when one wanted them.
“I wonder Bulwer Lytton did not guess me, and I wonder even more that he liked T. B.; but I am well pleased all the same.
“So you are coming round to M’Caskey. I half thought you would, and said little in his defence. It certainly is not easy for any one not ‘bog-born’ to understand that composite animal which Ireland produces, and has so much of the gentleman through a regularly demoralised scampish nature: the point d’honneur preserved after honour itself was gone, and the tradition of being respectable maintained after years of a sponging-house and the police-courts. Believe me, I know full fifty M’Caskeys, and one of them became a Chief Justice, though I don’t mean mine to end that way.
“My very warmest thanks for yours and Mrs Blackwood’s inquiries about my wife. She is a little better,—at least she says so, and that is something,—and she was very grateful about your interest for her.”