To Dr Burbidge.
“Tuesday, [? Oct.] 23, 1864.
“I had believed I was to be at Spezzia before this, but my wife still continues in a very precarious way, and I was afraid to leave her.
“I am, besides, hard at work closing ‘Tony,’ and getting another vol. of ‘O’Dowd’ ready for 1st of January. I have worked very steadily and, for me, most industriously the entire month, but my evenings are always lost, as people are now passing through to Rome.
“Hudson has taken a house near Florence, and Labouchere come back, so that some talkers there are at least.
“I mean to run down so soon as I finish cor-rectings, &c., at eight or ten days at furthest.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Villa Morelli, Oct. 27,1864.
“How strange a hit you made when you said, ‘I knew L. N. as well as if we had drunk together.’ I was a fellow-student with him at Göttingen in 1830,* and lived in great intimacy with him. There was a Scotchman there at the same time named Dickson, a great botanist, who has, I believe, since settled in London as a practising physician in Bryanstone Square. L. Nap. went by the name of Ct. Fattorini. He never would know Dickson, and used to leave me whenever D. came in. It was not for two years after that I learned he was ‘the Bonaparte.’ Our set consisted of L. N., Adolph V. Decken (who afterwards married the sister of the Duchess of C———, who now lives in Hanover), Beuliady the Home Minister, and Ct. Bray the Bavarian Envoy at Vienna; I, the penny-a-liner, being the complement of the party. I have had very strange companionships and strange turns in life, and when I have worked out my O’Dowd vein I’ll give you an autobiography.
* The date is incorrect. Lever’s Göttingen period was 1828.