“I have been frank with you in all, and you will be the same with me.
“You are right, the present day is better for novels than the past—at least, present-day readers say so. If you like I will get up a story to begin in April, ‘The New Charter,’ but I won’t think of it till I have done ‘Tony,’ which I own to you I like better on re-reading than I thought I should. Do you?
“Nothing is truer than what you say about my over-rapid writing. In the O’Ds. they are all the better for it, because I could talk them a hundred times better than I could write them; but where constructiveness comes in, it is very different.”
To Dr Burbidge.
“Villa Morelli, Florence, Oct. 21,1864.
“Though I have only been detained here by my wife’s illness, and should have been at Spezzia ere this, it was so far well that I was here to meet a perfect rush of friends and acquaintances who have come. Hudson, Perry from Venice, Delane, Pigott, D. Wolff, all here, and a host more, and as my wife is again up, we have them at various times and seasons, and a big dinner of them to-morrow.
“Renfrew of ‘The D. News’ tells me that O’D. was a great London success, and that the literary people like it and praised it,—evidence, thought I, that they’re not afraid of its author. He adds that I am not generally believed to have written it.
“I have not been up to work the last two days, and a remnant of a cold still keeps me ‘a-sneezin’.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Villa Morelli, Florence, Oct. 23.