“I shall be sorry if you omit the O’Ds. this month. Two of them, at least, are apropos, and would suffer. The careful meditation, too, is worth something, as I claim to be ready with my pen, even when I only wound my bird.” _To Mr John Blackwood_. “Villa MorElli, Florence, March 7, 1865. “I answer your note at once to acknowledge your cheque. It’s not necessary to tell you how I value your feeling for me, or how deeply I prize your treatment of me. Sorely as I feel the public neglect of ‘Tony,’ I declare I am more grieved on your account than on my own. It is in no puppyism I profess to think the book good: faults I know there are, scores of them, but there is more knowledge of men and women and better ‘talk’ in it, I honestly believe, than in those things which are run after and third-editioned. As to doing better--I frankly own I cannot. It is not _in_ me. I will not say I may not hit off my public better, though I’m not too confident of even _that_, but as to writing better, throwing off more original sketches of character,--better contrasts in colour or _sharper_ talkers,--don’t believe it! I cannot. “A more _ignorant_ notice than the ‘Saturday Review’ I never read. M’Caskey is no more an anachronism than myself! though perhaps the writer of the paper would say that is not taking a very strong ground. “Why don’t you like the ‘Rope Trick’? It is better than most of the O’Ds. By the way, Smith only _asked_ if I would send him O’Dowderies, and I misrepresented him if I conveyed anything stronger. I was not sorry, however, at the opportunity it gave me to say--how much and how strongly--I felt that they were _yours_ so long as you cared for them. You had been the godfather when they were christened. “I am half disappointed we don’t start B. F. next month; but you are always right,--perhaps even _that_ makes the thing harder to bear. “‘Piccadilly’ is very good, very amusing; one thing is pre-eminently clear, the writer is distinctively a ‘gentleman.’ None but a man hourly conversant with good society could give the tone he has given to Salon Life. It has the perfume of the drawing-room throughout it all, and if any one thinks that an easy thing to do, let him try it--that’s all “What you say of ‘Our Mutual Friend’ I agree with thoroughly. It is very disagreeable reading, and the characters are more or less repugnant and repelling; but there are bits, one especially, in the last No., of restoring a drowned fellow to life which no man living but Dickens could have written. I only quote ‘Armadale’ for the sake of the Dream Theory: it is an odious story to my thinking, and I never can separate the two cousins in my head, and make an infernal confusion in consequence. How good ‘Miss Marjoribanks’ is--how excellent! What intense humour, what real knowledge of human nature! To my thinking she has no equal, and so think all my womanhood, who prefer her to all the story-writers, male and female.