“You are quite right, it would do me immense good to breathe your bracing air, but it ‘mauna be.’ I wish I could see a chance of your crossing the Alps—is it on the cards?
“I wish I was twenty years younger and I’d make an effort to get into Parliament. Like my friend Corney, my friends always prophesied a success to me in something and somewhere that I have never explored—but so it is.
“Oh! for the books that have never been written,
With all the wise things that nobody has read.
And oh! for the hearts that have never been smitten,
Nor heard the fond things that nobody has said.
“My treasures are, I suspect, safely locked in the same secure obscurity. N’importe! at this moment I’d rather be sure my little girl would have a good night than I’d be Member for Oxford.”
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Villa Morelli, Florence, July 23, 1864.
“It would be unfair amidst all your labours to expect you could read through the volume of ‘Corney O’Dowd’ that Blackwood will have already sent—or a few days more will bring—to you. Still, if you will open it, and here and there look through some of those jottings-down, I know they will recall me to your memory. It is so very natural to me to half-reason over things, that an old friend [? like] yourself will recognise me on every page, and for this reason it is that I would like to imagine you reading it. My great critics declare that I have done nothing so good since the ‘Dodds,’—and now, enough of the whole theme!
“Here we are in a pretty villa on a south slope of the Apennines, with Florence at our feet and a glorious foreground of all that is richest in Italian foliage between us and the city. It is of all places the most perfect to write in,—beauty of view, quiet, silence, and seclusion all perfect,—but somehow I suppose I have grown a little footsore on the road. I do not write with my old facility. I sit and think—or fancy I think—and find very little is done after [all].
“The dreary thought of time lost and talent misapplied—for I ought never to have taken to the class of writing that I did—will invade, and, instead of plodding steadily along the journey, I am like one who sits down to cry over the map of the country to be traversed.
“I go to Spezzia occasionally—the fast mail now makes it but five hours. The Foreign Office is really most indulgent: they ask nothing of me, and in return I give them exactly what they ask.