“Every fresh speech of Gladstone gives me a fresh seizure, and his last ‘bunkum’ at Aberdeen has cost me a pint of colchicum. “I have an O’D. in my head on the ‘Cobden Campaign,’ but I suppose it is safer to leave it there. You know what the tenor replied when some one said from the pit, ‘Monsieur, vous chantez fau.’ ‘Je le sais, Monsieur, mais je ne veux pas qu’on me le dise.’ “Give my warmest regards to Mrs Blackwood. I wish with all my heart, gout _nonobstant_, I was to dine with you to-day.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Oct_. 17, 1871. “I know well but for golf and its ‘divartin’ sticks’ I should have had a line from you, but you have no moment to spare correcting O’Ds. amidst your distractions. “I kept back the proof I now send to hear from you and make any changes or alterations you might suggest, and I have a half-done O’Dowd ‘On Widows’ which I shall keep over for another time. I am sorely done up,--only able to crawl with a stick and a friendly arm, and so weak that the Irishwoman’s simile of a ‘sheet of wet paper’ is my only parallel. Robert Lytton tells me he has got such a pleasant letter from you. He and his wife had been stopping with us here, and we were delighted with them both.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Nov_. 1, 1871. “I was sorry not to see my ‘Home Rule’ in ‘Maga,’ but sorrier still not to hear from you, and I tormented myself thinking--which I ought not--that you were somewhat _chagriné_ with me. I am delighted now to find you are not, and that the only ‘grievance’ between us makes _me_ the plaintiff for your not having printed my O’D. I can forgive this, however, and honestly assure you that I could forgive even worse at your hands. It is the nervous fear that I may be falling into [? senility] as well as gout that makes me tetchy about a rejected paper. “Henry James got very safely out of my hands. He has no more pretension to play whist with me than I would have to cross-examine a witness before him, and I told him so before I won his sixpenny points. “I fortunately asked F. O. by telegraph if I should take on the despatches, as the messenger was in quarantine, and they said not. They knew they were Henry Elliott’s, and that the delay could not injure the freshness. He is a great diplomatist, and there is nothing ephemeral in the news he sends home. Drummond Wolff is here with me now and Lord Dalling, and our conversation is more remarkable for wit than propriety. “While James was here I was too gouty to go out with him, and what the latter Q.C. (queer customer) means by saying I was dog-bitten, I can’t guess. I am now crippled hand and foot, and a perfect curse to myself from irritability.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Trieste, _Nov_. 3, 1871.