“If the ‘Ballot’ O’D. be late to send back in proof, you will deal with it yourself. It is well to take the themes that are before men’s eyes, and say our say while there are ears to hear us. “The Emperor of Austria arrives here on Friday, and I am bidden to a great banquet, to be eaten in a tight uniform and epaulettes ‘with what appetite I may.’ I wish I could O’Dowd them all, and take my vengeance ‘in kind.’” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _April_ 13, 1869. “The piece of autobiography is fact. I was a young college man when I did the trick, and can to this day remember one sentence of Boyton’s own words, which I gave in the report verbatim. The peer was the late Marquis of Downshire, the greatest ass of the Conservative party, _et c’est beaucoup dire_. Boyton’s death was commemorated by a beautiful article in ‘Blackwood,’--I believe written by O’Sullivan, but I’m not sure. As for the ‘_Speech_-Makers’ Manual,’ it was published by Koutledge & Co. I got it out before I wrote my papers. It is incredibly absurd. The inscrutable man I refer to was Villiers--Fred Villiers,--a great friend of all the Bulwers, and formerly M.P. for Canterbury. He was no Villiers, had nothing, nor belonged to any one; but he was at the top of London society and knew every duke in England, and made a brilliant career of it for at least ten years or more. “I am very full of my trip to London, and mean to take my youngest daughter over--she has never been in England--to visit some friends and pass the summer in Devonshire. My leave is a very short one; and as they stop my pay, I can’t afford to prolong it. It will be a great delight to me to see you and Mrs Blackwood again, and I feel this is to be my farewell visit to England, my possibly last appearance before retiring from the boards for ever. “I have just found the reference to Boyton. It is taken from ‘The Dublin Evening Mail’ (the paper in which I gave Downshire his speech) for August 1833, but my impression is that there is another and longer notice of him in some other magazine later on. “It is very rarely that I wish for my youth back again; but now that I have begun to think of those days, and all the fine-hearted fellows I knew in them, I cannot repress the wish that I was once more what I was thirty-five years ago, and take my chance for doing something other and better than I have done. “The Austrians and Italians are doing now what they ought to have done fifteen years ago, making an alliance _against_ France--that is, to maintain a united neutrality if pressed by France to join her. How strange it is that nations, no more than individuals, do not see that it is not enough to do the _right thing_, but that it ought to be done at the _right time_ also. “For ever since I have known Italy I have said her natural ally was Austria, her natural enemy France.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Hôtel du Louvre, Paris, _May_ 4,1869.