“I know nobody jolly but Sydney. She writes me full accounts of Venetian Carnival doings,—masques and gondoliers, &c, &c., and music on the Grand Canal till daybreak.
“Here I am hipped and out of heart,—waiting, too, but for the undertaker, I believe, for it is the only ‘carriage exercise’ I should now care for.
“We had two smart shocks of earthquake yesterday. I thought that Cumming was going to be right after all, but it passed off with nothing worse than some tinkling of the teacups and a formidable swinging of the lustre over our heads.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Trieste, March 6, 1870.
“The Whigs would like to blend up Fenianism and agrarian crime. Now they are not to be so confounded. The National party is anti-English, rebel, violent, cruel, anything you like, but the men who shoot the landlords are not the Fenians! It is a brief I should like well to plead on, and you will see ere long that there will be many to acknowledge its truth.
“Gladstone will carry his Bill, I’m sure, but if the Tories are adroit they will make a complete schism in the Irish party and throw the Catholic set so completely on the side of the Ministry as to disgust the Protestant feeling of England. How I wish I had half an hour with Dizzy, and that he would condescend to listen to me!”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“March 15, 1870.
“I was glad to hear from you, and gladder to hear you liked the O’Ds.