“I have hints of a deep intrigue on the M’Glashan side to injure any dealings I may have with the London publishers. I am greatly provoked at M’Glashan being suffered to see my MS. of ‘Corrig O’Neill.’ It was a false move, and will [? inconvenience] me very considerably. He affected a half permission on my part which never was asked nor ever alluded to.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Carlsruhe, Jan. 26,1646.
“I think you over-estimate the value of the copyrights, and would gladly take £200 per vol.,—that is, £800 for ‘Hinton,’ ‘Burke,’ and ‘The O’Donoghue’; but if the Currys are likely to make a proposal, it is best to wait patiently. For although your calculation is perfectly correct as to proportion, ‘Hinton’ was a more than usually successful book, and too favourable to form a standard to measure others by. ‘O’D.’ will, however, I am given to believe, eventually rival it.
“I yesterday received a long and confidential letter from Lord Douro. The split in the Cabinet was not all on corn. The Duke wanted to give up the commandership-in-chief, and the Queen, folle de son mari, actually insisted on Prince Albert succeeding him,—an appointment which, if made, would outrage the service and insult the whole nation. To avoid such a coup the Duke was induced to hold on and save us—for the present, at least—from such a humiliation. As to the announcements in ‘The Times,’ and the disclosure of Cabinet secrets, the story is rather amusing. Lord Douro says, ‘If my father’s beard only heard him mutter in his sleep, he’d shave at bedtime.’ But Sidney Herbert is more in love and less discreet, for he actually told Mrs Norton what had occurred at the Council, and she sold the information to ‘The Times’ for a very large sum!* Even in Virgil he might have read a nice lesson on this head,—but I suppose his classical readings were more of Ovid latterly. Corn is doomed, and the Irish Church to be doomed—not now, but later. The League have secured four counties and several boroughs. As to war: the Duke says he could smash the Yankees, and ought to do so while France is in her present humour,—and Mexico opens the road to invasion in the South—not to speak of the terrible threat which Napier uttered, that with two regiments of infantry and a field battery he’d raise the Slave population in the Southern States.
* This story is now discredited, and was formally denied by
Lord Dufferin.
“The remark you heard at Curry’s about my Repealism is no new thing. M’G. tried to fasten the imputation upon me when I sold ‘St Patrick’s Eve’ to the London publishers, and the attempt to revive it displays his game. A very brief hint would make the Repeal editors adopt it for present gain and future attack when they discovered their error. However, the deception will not be long-lived, and I think on the appearance of No. 4 few will repeat the charge.
“Wilson (of Blackwood’s) has written me a long letter of such encouragement that, even bating its flattery, makes me stout-hearted against small critics and their barkings, and I am emboldened to hope that I am improving as a writer. One thing I can answer for,—no popularity I ever had, or shall have, will make me trifle with the public by fast writing and careless composition. Dickens’s last book* has set the gravestone on his fame, and the warning shall not be thrown away.”
* ‘Dombey and Son.’
To Mr Alexander Spencer.