To Mr John Blackwood.
“Trieste, Aug. 5, 1871.
“It is time I should thank you and Mrs Blackwood for your cordial invitation to myself and my daughter to go and see you in Scotland, and we are only too sorry we cannot manage you a visit, and in talk—for it is all that is left us—to ride over the links of Fife, and even assist at golf.
“Even if I could have plucked up courage to go over now, I ‘stopped’ myself by letting my ‘vice’ go on leave,—a piece of generosity on my part that has cost me heavier than I thought for, and gave me nearer opportunities of intimacy with Cardiff captains and Hull skippers than I care for.
“Of course, it is out of the question trying to write except on my ‘off days,’ when I shut out the whole rabble.
“I begin to think that Gladstone has been carried away by pure anger in all his late doings. It is purely womanish and hysterical throughout. To hit off this I have thrown off the short ‘O’Dowd,’ ‘What if they were to be Court-martialled?’ which, with a little change, will perhaps do.
“It is one of those cases which will be as long kept before the public, for it is the attack on a great principle—and in that sense no mere grievance of the hour.
“As a means of lowering the House of Lords—if such was the intention—it has totally failed, and even ‘Pall Mall’ has come to the side of the Peers, which is significant.
“I see Seymour, my old friend, has got his first verdict in the Hertford case. It is £70,000 a-year at issue, but of course the great battle will be fought before ‘the Lords,’”
To Mr John Blackwood.