“Trieste, Sept. 16, 1868.
“I have just had a round of clerical visitors, beginning with the Bishop of Gibraltar and ending with the Dean of Exeter. Very pleasant talking and humorous men, and only agreeably dashed with the priest element, which is sufficiently feminine to temper down the rougher natures of lay humanities.
“I’d like much to be with you and Story. There is a mine of the pleasantest sort of stuff in him. Pray commend me to him heartily.
“I am sentenced, however, to pass my life with Greeks, Jews, and Ethiopians and people below Jordan,—and I don’t take to it, that’s a fact! I hear that Gladstone will give up Disendowment and be satisfied with Disestablishment,—not because he wants to let the Church down easier, but that he neither knows how to rob nor what to do with the booty.
“If they only come to a long fight over the question, it will end by Dizzy dealing with the parsons as he did with the franchise. He’d bowl over Gladstone first and then carry the whole question, and not leave a curate nor even a grave-digger of the Establishment.
“I must positively manage a run over to town in spring—and Ireland too. This is essential.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Trieste, Oct. 5, 1868.
“I thank you heartily for the note and the enclosure: both were very welcome to me. Old as I am, I still need tin and tenderness.
“I have done a few lines, as you suggested, on Walewsky, whom I knew well. He was a good fellow, but with immense vanity and overruling self-conceit.