“I do hope I shall see you: no fault of mine will it be if I fail.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Villa Morelli, April 10, 1866.
“Send for No. 1 of ‘The Excursionist,’ edited by a Mr Cook, and if you don’t laugh, ‘you’re no’ the man I thought ye.’ He pitches in to me most furiously for my O’Dowd on the ‘Convict Tourists’; and seeing the tone of his paper, I only wonder he did not make the case actionable.
“He evidently believes that I saw him and his ‘drove Bulls,’ and takes the whole in the most serious light. Good Heavens! what a public he represents.
“The extracts he gives from the T. B.‘s article are far more really severe than anything I wrote, because the snob who wrote them was a bona fide witness of the atrocious snobs around him; and as for the tourist who asks, ‘Is this suit of clothes good enough for Florence, Mr Cook?’ I could make a book on him.
“The fellow is frantic, that is clear.
“Heaven grant that I may fall in with his tourists! I’ll certainly go and dine at any table d’hôte I find them at in Florence.
“I have been so put out (because my landlord will insist on putting me out) by change of house that I have not been able to write a line.”
To Mr John Blackwood.