“I wish I had three days with you in your breezy atmosphere to shake off my dumps and my dreariness.”
To Mr William Blackwood.
“Trieste, Sunday, Oct. 10.
“As I have made a slight addition to the ‘Canning’ O’D., I do not like to delay the proof beyond to-day, to which I waited in hope of a letter from your uncle.
“I have no good news to send of my poor wife, and I am very low and dispirited in consequence.
“I had a capital O’D. in my head this morning, but a bad sermon I have just heard has driven it clean out of my mind. I am quite ready to disendow my consular chaplain, and won’t give him his Sunday dinner in consequence.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Trieste, Oct. 14,1869.
“Many thanks for your cheque, which I have this moment received.
“You are not, I think, quite just about the last two O’Ds. First of all, an O’D. need not, nor can it, be always an epigram; it must occasionally be an argument epigrammatically treated, and ‘Close and the Carmelite’ is, I believe, such. The changed position of two Churchmen (representatives as they are of schools of thought) is well worth notice, and it would be well to show that the Dean’s Protestantism is not the national religion.