“Send me the Horse-book of your Cavalry Officer, and I’ll try and make a short notice of it. I want the book of Villa Architecture too. I was thinking of a paper (I have good bones for it) on the Italian fleet, wood and iron, but I foresee that I should say so many impertinent things, and hurt so many people I know, that I suspect on the whole it is better not to go on with it. What I am to do with my surplus venom when I close ‘O’Dowd’ I don’t see, except I go into the Church and preach on the Athanasian Creed.
“Wolff is in Paris still, scheming in ‘Turks.’
“It will astonish Lyons when he discovers what a heritage Bulwer has left him at Constantinople.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Villa Morelli, Oct. 20, 1866.
“Your note and its ‘padding’ came to my hand a couple of hours ago. I thank you much for both, but more for the encouragement than the cash, though I wanted the last badly.
“I don’t think there is a public for O’D. collectively. I don’t think people will take more than a monthly dose of ‘my bitters,’ and I incline to suspect mawkish twaddle and old Joe Millers would hit the mark better. Shall I try? At all events, make room if you can for the postscript I send you. Now I wrote it at your own suggestion when I read your note, and it seems to me to embody the dispute. I have tried to put in a bit of Swift s tart dryness in the style.
“The telegram just announces Palmerston’s death. Take care that his name does not occur in my last O’D. I don’t remember using it, but look to it for me.
“What will happen now? I hear the Whigs won’t have Russell, and that he won’t serve under Clarendon.
“How I wish I were in England to hear all the talk. It is d———d hard to be chained up here and left only to bark, when I want to bite too.”