“I am well pleased that you like the wind-up of ‘Sir B.’ It is always my weak point; and so instinctively do I feel it so, that I fear I shall make a bad ending myself. I half suspect, however, that your praise was a delicate forbearance, and that you really _did_ see some abruptness. Now I have a great horror of being thought prosy. There is something in prosiness that resembles a moral paralysis, and I fear it as I should fear a real palsy. “I have written a few last words, which I leave to your judgment to subjoin or not. It’s well I have wound up the story, for I begin to feel some signs of a return of the attack I had last spring. Perhaps, however, it may pass off without carrying me with it. “Wolff is here: he dined here yesterday, and made us laugh heartily at his account of the way Labouchere blackguarded him on the hustings at Windsor,--‘The knight from the Ionian Islands, whose glittering honours would not be the worse of the horse-pond,’ and after this went and dined with him at the ‘Star’! “Wolff has come out with some credit from our people about a great ‘robbery’ to be done on the Italian Government--a loan of a hundred millions (francs, of course). “I hear Lord Stanley would give me Venice--the Consul-Generalship--if Perry would resign or die. He has been ‘cretinised’ these ten years, but idiocy is the best guarantee for longevity. ‘The men the gods loved’ were clever fellows, and they ‘had their reward.’ It would be a great boon to me to get a place before I break up,--just as it is a polite attention to offer a lady a chair before she faints. “If I get upon L. Nap. I shall write you ten pages, so I forbear, but not until I have screamed my loudest against that stupid credulity with which the English papers accept his circular as ‘Peace.’ Don’t you remember what Swift said to Bickerstaff, when the latter declared he was _not_ dead? ‘_Now we know_ you are dead, for you never told a word of truth in your life.’ “Did you see that the Cave of Adullam was originally Lincoln’s? I have noted eight distinct thefts of Bright, and am half disposed to give them in a paper with the title, ‘Blunderings and Plunder-ings of John Bright.’ “I have taken to gardening,--it’s cheaper than whist, and a watering-pot is a modest investment; besides, I feel like a Cockney friend who retired from the gay world and took to horticulture,--‘One never can want company who has a hoe and a rake.” _To Mr John Blackwood._ “Villa Morelli, Florence, _Sept_. 29,1866. “I have conceived a new story which may, I think, turn out well. I do not wish to do it hurriedly, but if you think it would suit you by the opening of the New Year, I will go on to shape and mould it in my head, and when in a state to do so, send you some pages.