“My heartiest thanks for the photograph. It is the face of a friend and, _entre nous_, just now I have need of it, for I am very low and depressed, but I don’t mean to worry you with these things. What a fine fellow your Colonel is! I am right proud that he likes ‘O’Dowd,’ and so too of your friend Smith, because I know if the officers are with me we must have the rank and file later on. I read the ‘Saturday Review’ with the sort of feeling I have now and then left a dull dinner-party, thinking little of myself but still less of the company. Now, I may be stupid, but I’ll be d------d if I’m as bad as that fellow! “One’s friends of course are no criterion, but I _have_ got very pleasant notices from several, and none condemnatory, but still I shall be sorely provoked if _your_ good opinion of me shall not be borne out by the public. Galileo said ‘Ê pur se muove,’ but the Sacred College outvoted him. God grant that you may not be the only man that doesn’t think me a blockhead! “I want to be at ‘Tony,’ but I am so very low and dispirited I shall make a mess of whatever I touch, and so it is better to abstain. “If I could only say of John Wilson one-half that I _feel_ about him. If I could only tell Cockneydom that they never had, and probably never will have, a measure to take the height of so noble a fellow, one whose very manliness lifted him clear and clean above their petty appreciation, just as in his stalwart vigour he was a match for any score of them, and whom they would no more have ventured to scoff at while living than they would have dared to confront foot to foot upon the heather. If I could say, in fact, but a tithe of what his name calls up within me, I _could_ write a paper on the _Noctes_, but the theme would run away with me. Wilson was the only hero of my boy days, and I never displaced him from the pedestal since. By Jove! ‘Ebony’ had giants in those days. Do you know that no praise of O’D. had the same flattery for me as comparing it with the papers by Maginn long ago. So you see I am ending my days under the flag that fascinated my first ambition: my grief is, my dear Blackwood, that you have not had the first of the liquor and not the lees of the cask.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Villa Morelli, Florence, _Sept_. 6, 1864. “I have just had your letter and enclosure,--many thanks for both. I hope you may like the O’D. I sent you for next month. Don’t be afraid of my breaking down as to time, though I may as to merit. You may always rely on my punctuality--and I am vain of it, as the only orderly quality in my whole nature.... “I am very anxious about ‘Tony,’ I want to make a good book of it, and my very anxiety may mar my intentions. Tell me another thing: When ‘Tony’ appears in three vols., should it come out without name, or a _nom de plume_,--which is better? “Why does not ‘The Times’ notice O’D.? They are talking of all the tiresome books in the world,--why not mine?