“It is time I should thank you and Mrs Blackwood for your cordial invitation to myself and my daughter to go and see you in Scotland, and we are only too sorry we cannot manage you a visit, and in talk--for it is all that is left us--to ride over the links of Fife, and even assist at golf. “Even if I could have plucked up courage to go over now, I ‘stopped’ myself by letting my ‘vice’ go on leave,--a piece of generosity on my part that has cost me heavier than I thought for, and gave me nearer opportunities of intimacy with Cardiff captains and Hull skippers than I care for. “Of course, it is out of the question trying to write except on my ‘off days,’ when I shut out the whole rabble. “I begin to think that Gladstone has been carried away by pure anger in all his late doings. It is purely womanish and hysterical throughout. To hit off this I have thrown off the short ‘O’Dowd,’ ‘What if they were to be Court-martialled?’ which, with a little change, will perhaps do. “It is one of those cases which will be as long kept before the public, for it is the attack on a great principle--and in that sense no mere grievance of the hour. “As a means of lowering the House of Lords--if such was the intention--it has totally failed, and even ‘Pall Mall’ has come to the side of the Peers, which is significant. “I see Seymour, my old friend, has got his first verdict in the Hertford case. It is £70,000 a-year at issue, but of course the great battle will be fought before ‘the Lords,’” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Aug_. 17,1871. “About half an hour after your pleasant letter and its handsome enclosure reached me, Langford came in. He was on his way to Venice, but, like a good fellow, stopped to dine with myself and daughter. “We are delighted with him,--not only with his talk about books and writers, Garrick men and reviewers, but with his fine fresh-hearted appreciation of all he sees in his tour. He likes everything, and travels really to enjoy it. “I wish I knew how to detain him here a little longer; though, God knows, no place nor no man has fewer pretensions to lay an embargo on any one. “I took him out to see Miramar last evening, and we both wished greatly you had been with us. It was a cool drive of some miles along the Adriatic, with the Dalmatian mountains in front, and to the westward the whole Julian Alps snow-topped and edged. I know you would have enjoyed it. “I am so glad you like the O’Ds. As I grow older I become more and more distrustful of all I do; in fact, I feel like the man who does not know when he draws on his banker that he may not have overdrawn his account and have his cheque returned. This is very like intellectual bankruptcy, or the dread of it, which is much the same.