“Send me the Mag. as _early as you can_ this month. It will comfort me at Spezzia if I can take it down there, but address me still Florence as usual. “What do you think of an O’D. on the Serial Story-writer? I shall be all the better pleased if Lawson O’D. stand over for August, for I shall be close run for time this month to come, and it is no joke writing with the thermometer at 93° in the shade. In Ireland the belief is that a man who is dragged out to fight a duel against his will is sure to be shot, and I own I am superstitious enough to augur very ill of our going to war in the same reluctant fashion.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Villa Morelli, _June_ 30, 1864. “I send off to-day (_sit faust dies_) by book-post ‘O’Dowd’ corrected, and I enclose a few lines to open with a dedication to Anster. I am not quite _sure_ of the ‘notice,’ nor shall I be till I hear if you like it. I have gout and blue devils on me, but you can always do more for me than colchicum if you say ‘all right.’ “I hope we shall have a nice-looking book and a smart outside, and, above all, that we shall appear before the end of July, when people begin to scatter. I am very anxious about it all. “I am not able to go down to Spezzia for some days, and if I can I shall attack ‘Tony’--not but the chances are sorely against anything pleasant if I mix with the characters any share of my present idiosyncrasy.... “I count on hearing from you now oftener that you are away from Whitebait. I was getting very sulky with the dinner-parties of which I was not a sharer. I met Mr and Mrs Sturgis at Thackeray’s at dinner. They were there, I think, on the day when one of Thackeray’s guests left the table to send him a challenge--the most absurd incident I ever witnessed. The man was a Mr Synge, formally Attaché at Washington, and now H.M’s Consul at the Sandwich Islands.” _To Mr John Blackwood_. “Villa Morklli, My 4,1864. “I merely write a line. Your note and cheque came all right to me this morning. My thanks for both. I have had four mortal days of stupidity, and the fifth is on me this morning; but after I have had a few days at Spezzia I hope to be all right and in the harness again. “If Dizzy’s vote of censure is not very much amplified in his _exposé_, it ought not to be difficult to meet it. The persistent way he dogged Palmerston to say something, anything, is so like Sir Lucius O’Trigger seizing on the first chance of a contradiction and saying, ‘Well, sir, I differ from you there.’ “Pam’s declaration that ‘war’ was possible in certain emergencies--when, for instance, the king should have been crucified and the princesses vanished--was the only thing like devilling I heard from him yet. This is, however, as palpably imbecility as anything they could do, and _one_ symptom, when a _leading one_, is as good as ten thousand.