“I need not say I have done nothing but answer and write notes for the last few weeks, and sit in commission over trousseau details, for which how I am ever to pay I hope somebody knows--but _I_ do not. I remember Fergus O’Connor saying that he could ‘get in’ for Mallow ‘if he could stand a dinner to his committee,’ and I can fully appreciate that nice situation at present. “Mr Cook has been at me again in a pamphlet. It was only a few days back he went through here with a gang, and I had determined to dine at _table d’hôte_ with them, but was laid up with a heavy cold and sorely disappointed accordingly. “I hear from London that Dizzy is hopeful and in good heart, but of what or why I cannot guess. Certainly the country is not Conservatively-minded now, nor could the Tories succeed to power except by repeating the Reform Bill dodge of outbidding the Whigs and then strengthening the Radical party. That Dizzy is ready for this, and that he would push a Land Bill for Ireland to actual commission, I can easily believe; but are we not all sick of being ‘shuttlecocked’ between two ambitious and jealous rivals? And is there not something else to be thought of than who is to be First Lord of the Treasury? “I see a book advertised called ‘Varieties of Viceregal Life.’ If I had it I suspect I could make an amusing paper on it--that is, if the book bore out its title.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Feb_. 9, 1870. “I have been hoping and hoping to have a line from you, and would still go on waiting for it only that the ‘O’Dowd’ I now send is too ‘apropos’ for delay. It is the only one I have written, but think you have still one or two by you--‘The Pope,’ and ‘Landlords and Limits.’ I am terribly knocked up,--such an attack on the chest,--and not able to leave my room, and at a time when I am full of care and occupation. “Lord Clarendon has written me a private and confidential about ‘Cook and the Excursionists,’ who have petitioned him against me. Lord Clarendon evidently foresees a ‘question’ to be asked in the House, and wants an answer. Mine was that Cornelius O’Dowd was not in the Consular service, nor, so far as I was aware, had he any relations with F. O.; that he was a person who amused himself and, when he could, other people, by ridiculing whatever was absurd, or in bad taste or manners, or hypocritical in morals; and that being one who had followed the avocation of a writing man for thirty years, he must be understood to have acquired some notions, not only of the privileges but the responsibilities of the pen; and that, finally, as Consul Lever, I had no explanation to make Mr Cook, who first blackguarded me in print and then appealed to my official superior.