“I hope we shall have a nice-looking book and a smart outside, and, above all, that we shall appear before the end of July, when people begin to scatter. I am very anxious about it all.
“I am not able to go down to Spezzia for some days, and if I can I shall attack ‘Tony’—not but the chances are sorely against anything pleasant if I mix with the characters any share of my present idiosyncrasy....
“I count on hearing from you now oftener that you are away from Whitebait. I was getting very sulky with the dinner-parties of which I was not a sharer. I met Mr and Mrs Sturgis at Thackeray’s at dinner. They were there, I think, on the day when one of Thackeray’s guests left the table to send him a challenge—the most absurd incident I ever witnessed. The man was a Mr Synge, formally Attaché at Washington, and now H.M’s Consul at the Sandwich Islands.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Villa Morklli, My 4,1864.
“I merely write a line. Your note and cheque came all right to me this morning. My thanks for both. I have had four mortal days of stupidity, and the fifth is on me this morning; but after I have had a few days at Spezzia I hope to be all right and in the harness again.
“If Dizzy’s vote of censure is not very much amplified in his exposé, it ought not to be difficult to meet it. The persistent way he dogged Palmerston to say something, anything, is so like Sir Lucius O’Trigger seizing on the first chance of a contradiction and saying, ‘Well, sir, I differ from you there.’
“Pam’s declaration that ‘war’ was possible in certain emergencies—when, for instance, the king should have been crucified and the princesses vanished—was the only thing like devilling I heard from him yet. This is, however, as palpably imbecility as anything they could do, and one symptom, when a leading one, is as good as ten thousand.
“Old Begration once told the Duke of Wellington that the discovery of a French horse-shoe ‘not roughed’ for the frost in the month of October was the reason for the burning of Moscow. They said: ‘These French know nothing of our climate; one winter here would kill them,’ It was the present Duke told me this story.
“You will have had my O’D. on the Conference before this, and if the Debate offer anything opportune for comment I’ll tag it on. The fact is, one can always do with an ‘O’Dowd’ what the parson accomplished when asked to preach a charity sermon,—graft the incident on the original discourse. Indeed I feel at such moments that my proper sphere would have been the pulpit. Perhaps I am more convinced of this to-day, as I have gout on me. Don’t you know what Talleyrand said to the friend who paid him a compliment on his fresh and handsome appearance as he landed at Dover?—‘Ah! it’s the sea-sickness, perhaps, has done it.’”