“Who writes ‘M. Aurelia’? He or she certainly knows nothing of Italian nature or temperament. Not but that the story opens well and is cleverly written, but I demur to the Italian. _I_ know the rascals well; but, like short whist, it cost me twenty years and some tin to do it. Keep my opinion, however, to yourself, for I hate to disparage a contemporary, and indeed this slipped out of me because my daughter has been talking to me of the story while I write.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Sept_. 16, 1868. “I have just had a round of clerical visitors, beginning with the Bishop of Gibraltar and ending with the Dean of Exeter. Very pleasant talking and humorous men, and only agreeably dashed with the priest element, which is sufficiently feminine to temper down the rougher natures of lay humanities. “I’d like much to be with you and Story. There is a mine of the pleasantest sort of stuff in him. Pray commend me to him heartily. “I am sentenced, however, to pass my life with Greeks, Jews, and Ethiopians and people below Jordan,--and I don’t take to it, that’s a fact! I hear that Gladstone will give up Disendowment and be satisfied with Disestablishment,--not because he wants to let the Church down easier, but that he neither knows how to rob nor what to do with the booty. “If they only come to a _long_ fight over the question, it will end by Dizzy dealing with the parsons as he did with the franchise. He’d bowl over Gladstone first and then carry the whole question, and not leave a curate nor even a grave-digger of the Establishment. “I must positively manage a run over to town in spring--and Ireland too. This is essential.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Oct_. 5, 1868. “I thank you heartily for the note and the enclosure: both were very welcome to me. Old as I am, I still need tin and tenderness. “I have done a few lines, as you suggested, on Walewsky, whom I knew well. He was a good fellow, but with immense vanity and overruling self-conceit. “I have determined to go to Ireland in the beginning of the year, and seek out in a part of Donegal not known to me nor, I believe, many others, the _locale_ of a new story. I want to do something with a strong local colour, and feel that I must freshen myself up for the effort. My poor wife gains very slowly, but I hope and trust she may be well enough to let me leave her by February. “If you saw my surroundings here--my Jews and Greeks and Armenians, and, worse than these, my Christian friends!--you would really credit me with resources that I honestly own I never believed in. How I do anything amongst them puzzles me. “It is a good thought about the Election addresses. I’ll think over it. “Who wrote ‘Aurelia,’ and how long will it run?” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Oct_. 17, 1868.