“I shall carry on ‘Tony’ to January, and will want the chapter you sent me now to open December No. So much for the past. Now for what I have some scruples to inflict on you, but I can’t help it. I want, if it suits you, to take the O’D.,--that is, the present vol., and that which is ready, say, in January or February,--and give me anything you think it worth for my share of it, for I am greatly hampered just now. My poor boy left a number of debts (some with brother officers); and though nothing could be more considerate and gentleman-like than their treatment of me, and the considerate way they left me to my own time to pay, pay I must. What I am to receive for ‘Tony’ will have to be handed over _en masse_, and yet only meet less than half what I owe. Now, my dear Blackwood, do not mistake me, and do not, I entreat, read me wrong: I don’t want you to do anything by me through any sense of your sympathy for these troubles,--because if you did so, I could never have the honest feeling of independence that enables me to write to you as I do, and as your friend,--but I want you to understand that if it _accords with your plans_ to take ‘O’Dowd’ altogether to yourself, it would much help _me_; and if for the _future_ you would so accept it, giving me anything you deem the whole worth, all the better for me. By this means I could get rid of some of my cares: there are heavier ones behind, but these I must bear how I may. “I have been frank with you in all, and you will be the same with me. “You are right, the present day is better for novels than the past--at least, present-day readers say so. If you like I will get up a story to begin in April, ‘The New Charter,’ but I won’t think of it till I have done ‘Tony,’ which I own to you I like better on re-reading than I thought I should. Do you? “Nothing is truer than what you say about my over-rapid writing. In the O’Ds. they are all the better for it, because I could talk them a hundred times better than I could write them; but where constructiveness comes in, it is very different.” _To Dr Burbidge._ “Villa Morelli, Florence, _Oct_. 21,1864. “Though I have only been detained here by my wife’s illness, and should have been at Spezzia ere this, it was so far well that I was here to meet a perfect rush of friends and acquaintances who have come. Hudson, Perry from Venice, Delane, Pigott, D. Wolff, all here, and a host more, and as my wife is again up, we have them at various times and seasons, and a big dinner of them to-morrow. “Renfrew of ‘The D. News’ tells me that O’D. was a great London success, and that the literary people like it and praised it,--evidence, thought I, that they’re not afraid of its author. He adds that I am not generally believed to have written it. “I have not been up to work the last two days, and a remnant of a cold still keeps me ‘a-sneezin’.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Villa Morelli, Florence, _Oct_. 23.