“I wish I had had his campaigning opportunities,—not that I have the most fragmentary faculty of observation, but there is a colour and a keeping over all that one calls up in memory, which nothing replaces, and certainly Major M’Caskey would have been not only ‘circumstantial’ but occasionally ‘correct’ if he had known how. I thought I was imagining a very boastful and pretentious rascal, who had few scruples in assuring himself to be a man of genius and a hero, but I have just read the new preface to ‘Lothair,’ and I actually feel Major M’Caskey to be a diffident and retiring character, very slow to put forward a claim to any superiority, and on the whole reluctant to take any credit for his own abilities.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Trieste, Nov. 11, 1870.
“While waiting for the proof of M’C. I finish the part for December. I now suspect that the war will go on to an attack on Paris, and mean to bring the next No. up to the actual events of the day. It is only by exhibiting him as an audacious liar that his impertinences on the correspondent class could be tolerated, but they will surely not be touchy at being called to account by such a critic.
“The Imperial correspondence now published shows it is scarcely possible to invent anything too bold or too outrageous for belief, and the absolute vulgarity of the State contrivances and expedients is not the least remarkable part of the whole. If I ever get to the diplomacies of the war I shall have some fun.
“Of course the present part must look to yourself for correction.
“‘The Observer’ has a short notice of M’C. this week, and ‘The Sun’ another and more civil.
“Have you seen that the Emperor in his pamphlet endorses the very strategy recommended by M’Caskey—the attack on Central Germany?”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Trieste, Nov. 14.