“How strange a hit you made when you said, ‘I knew L. N. as well as if we had drunk together.’ I was a fellow-student with him at Göttingen in 1830,* and lived in great intimacy with him. There was a Scotchman there at the same time named Dickson, a great botanist, who has, I believe, since settled in London as a practising physician in Bryanstone Square. L. Nap. went by the name of Ct. Fattorini. He never would know Dickson, and used to leave me whenever D. came in. It was not for two years after that I learned he was ‘the Bonaparte.’ Our set consisted of L. N., Adolph V. Decken (who afterwards married the sister of the Duchess of C------, who now lives in Hanover), Beuliady the Home Minister, and Ct. Bray the Bavarian Envoy at Vienna; I, the penny-a-liner, being the complement of the party. I have had very strange companionships and strange turns in life, and when I have worked out my O’Dowd vein I’ll give you an autobiography. * The date is incorrect. Lever’s Göttingen period was 1828. “I now send you a political O’D. on L. N., not over civil; but I detest the man, and I suspect I _know_ him and read him aright. Banting I did without waiting for his book; but if it comes I will perhaps squeeze something out of it. “I am crippled with gout, and can scarcely hold a pen. The bit on doctors is simply padding, and don’t put it in if you don’t like; but the No. for December will, I think, be a strong one. “Sir Jas. Hudson is with me, but I am too low even for his glorious companionship--and he has no equal. Wolff is here, and all to stay for the winter. “What do you think of my advertising O’D. at the end of the Banting paper? Does it not remind you of the epitaph to the French hosier, where, after the enumeration of his virtues as husband and father, the widow announces that she ‘continues the business at the old estab., Rue Neuve des Petits Champs,’ &c. &c.?” _To Dr Burbidge._ “Florence, Nov. 3, 1864. “Bulwer the Great has stayed here, and will not leave till to-morrow, and if you see Rice, will you please to tell him so. I am so primed that I think I could write a great paper on the present state and future prospects of Turkey. “He has been very agreeable, and with all his affectations--legion that they are--very amusing. “Layard I don’t like at all; he is the complete stamp to represent a (metropolitan) constituency--overbearing, loud, self-opinionated, and half-informed, if so much. Bulwer appeared to great advantage in his company. “In my desire to see how far you were just or unjust to Georgina, I set to work to read over again the scenes she occurs in, and went from end to end of ‘Tony Butler,’ and at last came in despair to ask Julia to find her out for me! So much for the gift of constructiveness, and that power of concentration without which, Sir E. B. Lytton says, there is no success in fiction-writing.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Villa Morelli, _Nov_. 6, 1864.