“I have your note and its enclosure. My apothecary will just take the last, and may the devil do him good with it: I grudge it with all heart. My thanks to you, all the same.
“I am right glad you like ‘Sir B.’ To tell you truth, I was rather put out at not hearing you say so before, for I thought the last bit good. I am sorry now to know the reason. You ill! I’d be shot, if I were you, if I’d condescend to be ill. With your comfortable house and your 34 Bordeaux it’s downright mean-spirited to be sick. I can imagine an unlucky devil like myself knocked up, because so little does it. Like the Irish on their potato-diet, they are always only a potato-skin above starvation; so fellows like myself are only a hair above hanging themselves. Don’t let me hear of your being blue-devilled, or I’ll go over to St Andrews and abuse you.
“I send you a short O’D.—which, as Mrs Dodd says, may please the Mammoth of unrighteousness, the press!—on ‘Our War Correspondents,’ also ‘On Bathing Naked.’ The last will help to relieve the dryness of politics, in which O’D. has of late indulged much.
“I am not ashamed of ‘Sir B.,’ and I leave it entirely to yourself to append the name or not. I think Tony was injured by being anonymous, and this had probably better be acknowledged.
“If I could manage it, I’d go over to see Venice on its cession. It would be curious in many ways.
“Do you perceive how L. Nap, is laying by the nest-egg of future discord in Germany, fomenting discontent in all Southern Germany, and exciting the King of Saxony to defer accepting terms of peace? Contracts are already taken in Austria to provision the Saxon troops for three months, so that there is no question whatever of their return to Saxony. All this shows clearly enough what pressure he means to put upon Prussia—that is to say, how much he intends to gall and goad her. If she resent, she must do something provocative, and that provocation will be all the Emperor needs to stir up French anger, always ready enough to take fire. It is in this way this scoundrel always works,—like the duellists who force the challenge from the other party, that they may have the choice of the weapon!
“I hope to God he won’t drive me mad, as my daughters daily tell me, for I can’t keep myself from thinking and talking of him. He destroys the comfort of my daily potatoes, and I think my little franc Bordeaux is soured by the thought of him.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Villa Morelli, Sept. 24,1866.
“I am well pleased that you like the wind-up of ‘Sir B.’ It is always my weak point; and so instinctively do I feel it so, that I fear I shall make a bad ending myself. I half suspect, however, that your praise was a delicate forbearance, and that you really did see some abruptness. Now I have a great horror of being thought prosy. There is something in prosiness that resembles a moral paralysis, and I fear it as I should fear a real palsy.