“I write with great difficulty, or, rather, with a daily increasing repugnance to writing. ‘Bramleighs’ you recognise, I suppose: I’ll own the paternity when it is full grown. And I am scribbling odd papers, O’Dowderies, and others, but all without zest or pleasure. They are waifs that I never look after when they leave me; and this has Trieste done for me! “What are you doing yourself? and how is Malta? There must surely be some congenial people in it. “How miserably the Italians lost their opportunity in not backing up Garibaldi and making Rome their own at once! and now the great question--Will the country wait? will the Constitutional party be able to move with half steam on, and still steer the ship? I firmly believe in war, but all my friends in England disagree with me: they talk of bankruptcy, as if the length of the bill ever baulked any man’s appetite. “I don’t think I understood you aright in your last. Is it that I ought to wind up the O’Dowd and start a new shaft, or do you encourage going on? I am equal to either fortune. Of the two, it is always easier for me to lay a new foundation than put a roof on an old building. Give me your advice, and as freely as may be, for I hold much to it.” XVIII. TRIESTE 1868 _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _jan_ 3, 1868. “Immense preparations are being made here for the reception of the remains of the Emperor of Mexico, to arrive on the 15th. It will be a very grand and solemn affair. “I think the squib I enclose will please you. It is in the form of a letter from M. M’Caskey to a Fenian colonel, showing what ought and ought not to be the Fenian strategy. The main point is, however, to lay stress on the necessity of ascribing all brutalities to the Government.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Jan_. 6, 1868. “Your note and enclosure, though delayed by the snow in Styria, reached me all safely yesterday. Your hearty words of good cheer dallied me out of a blue-devilism that is more often my companion nowadays than some fifteen or twenty years ago. “I am sincerely glad you liked ‘B. C.’ I sent it to you because I really thought it good--I mean, for the sort of thing it pretends to be. “I hope you will like ‘M’Caske ‘: it may need a little retouching, but not much. I send you some O’Ds., and if I live and do well I’ll try a story for March No. I have a sort of glimmering notion of one flitting across me now. “We are here in the midst of _crêpe_ and black cloth, and for poor Maximilian, whose body is to arrive this week. What a blunder of our people not to send a ship to the convoy, as the French have done. We have no tact of this kind, and lose more than you would believe by the want of it.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ [Undated.] “The Russians, people think here, will open the ball next spring by pushing the Montenegrins to a rupture with the Turks, and thus opening an opportunity for themselves to come in. Prussia is then to cross the Maine, and the rest to follow.