"The marriage is to take place on the 21st, and after a trip to Rome, &c, they visit Paris, and on to London some time in April. Sydney ardently hopes that you and Mrs Blackwood may be in town this season: she longs to see you both again.
"I need not say I have done nothing but answer and write notes for the last few weeks, and sit in commission over trousseau details, for which how I am ever to pay I hope somebody knows--but _I_ do not. I remember Fergus O'Connor saying that he could 'get in' for Mallow 'if he could stand a dinner to his committee,' and I can fully appreciate that nice situation at present.
"Mr Cook has been at me again in a pamphlet. It was only a few days back he went through here with a gang, and I had determined to dine at _table d'hote_ with them, but was laid up with a heavy cold and sorely disappointed accordingly.
"I hear from London that Dizzy is hopeful and in good heart, but of what or why I cannot guess. Certainly the country is not Conservatively-minded now, nor could the Tories succeed to power except by repeating the Reform Bill dodge of outbidding the Whigs and then strengthening the Radical party. That Dizzy is ready for this, and that he would push a Land Bill for Ireland to actual commission, I can easily believe; but are we not all sick of being 'shuttlecocked' between two ambitious and jealous rivals? And is there not something else to be thought of than who is to be First Lord of the Treasury?
"I see a book advertised called 'Varieties of Viceregal Life.' If I had it I suspect I could make an amusing paper on it--that is, if the book bore out its title."
_To Mr John Blackwood._
"Trieste, _Feb_. 9, 1870.
"I have been hoping and hoping to have a line from you, and would still go on waiting for it only that the 'O'Dowd' I now send is too 'apropos'
for delay. It is the only one I have written, but think you have still one or two by you--'The Pope,' and 'Landlords and Limits.' I am terribly knocked up,--such an attack on the chest,--and not able to leave my room, and at a time when I am full of care and occupation.
"Lord Clarendon has written me a private and confidential about 'Cook and the Excursionists,' who have petitioned him against me. Lord Clarendon evidently foresees a 'question' to be asked in the House, and wants an answer. Mine was that Cornelius O'Dowd was not in the Consular service, nor, so far as I was aware, had he any relations with F.
O.; that he was a person who amused himself and, when he could, other people, by ridiculing whatever was absurd, or in bad taste or manners, or hypocritical in morals; and that being one who had followed the avocation of a writing man for thirty years, he must be understood to have acquired some notions, not only of the privileges but the responsibilities of the pen; and that, finally, as Consul Lever, I had no explanation to make Mr Cook, who first blackguarded me in print and then appealed to my official superior.
"Sydney's marriage comes off Monday 21st. I am forced to say, like King Frederic of Prussia, 'Another such victory would ruin me.' To be sent to one's grave by milliners does seem a very ignoble destiny!--but a bad bronchitis, aided by Brussels lace, has brought me to a state of feverish irritability that, if it does not terrify me, certainly alarms my family, and _con ragione_."
_To Mr John Blackwood._
"Trieste, _March_ 3,1870.
"Perhaps you'll say 'dull as ditch water' was the inspiration as well as the title of this 'O'Dowd/ and mayhap I won't deny it. It is, however, a heartfelt cry over the dreariness of the time the 'whole world over,'
and I am sure many will acknowledge the truth of it.
"I know nobody jolly but Sydney. She writes me full accounts of Venetian Carnival doings,--masques and gondoliers, &c, &c., and music on the Grand Canal till daybreak.
"Here I am hipped and out of heart,--waiting, too, but for the undertaker, I believe, for it is the only 'carriage exercise' I should now care for.
"We had two smart shocks of earthquake yesterday. I thought that Cumming was going to be right after all, but it passed off with nothing worse than some tinkling of the teacups and a formidable swinging of the lustre over our heads."
_To Mr John Blackwood._
"Trieste, _March_ 6, 1870.
"The Whigs would like to blend up Fenianism and agrarian crime. _Now they are not to be so confounded_. The National party is anti-English, rebel, violent, cruel, anything you like, but the men _who shoot the landlords are not the Fenians!_ It is a brief I should like well to plead on, and you will see ere long that there will be many to acknowledge its truth.
"Gladstone will carry his Bill, I'm sure, but if the Tories are adroit they will make a complete schism in the Irish party and throw the Catholic set so completely on the side of the Ministry as to disgust the Protestant feeling of England. How I wish I had half an hour with Dizzy, and that he would condescend to listen to me!"
_To Mr John Blackwood._
"March 15, 1870.
"I was glad to hear from you, and gladder to hear you liked the O'Ds.
"Sydney is away to Rome honeymooning it very pleasantly, and meeting all manner of attentions, &c. The trousseau has spoilt my trip to town. I have 'taken out' in white lace what I meant for 'whitebait,' and I must try and screw on in life for one year more if I mean to see London again. It was the celebrated Betty O'Dwyer that said to her legs, 'I'll take another season out of you before I'll give you to Tom O'Callaghan.'"
_To Mr William Blackwood._
"_March_ 16,1870.
"I have no patience with you for being ill. What I a fellow of something and twenty, with a sound chest, six feet in his stockings, and a hunter in top condition; what an ungrateful dog to Fortune you are!
Leave sickness to old cripples like myself,--hipped, dunned, and blue-devilled,--with a bad balance at the bank, and a ruined digestion.
_You_ have no business with malady! Come over and see me here: the very contrast will make you happy and contented.
"I hope, however, you are all right by this time. I'm sure you stick too close to the desk. Be warned by _me!_ It was all over-application and excessive industry ruined _my_ constitution; and instead of being threatened to be cut off, as I am now, in the flower of my youth, I might have lived on to a ripe old age, and all that rottenness that they tell us makes 'medlars' exquisite.
"I send you a tailpiece to the O'D. Heaven grant that the Saxon intelligence, for which I daily feel less veneration, should not suspect me of being a Fenian in disguise, though if it should get me dismissed from my consulate and turned out into the streets, I'd almost cry hurrah! for, after all, picking oakum could scarcely be worse than cudgelling my brains for what, after all the manipulation, can't be got out of them."
_To Mr John Blackwood._
"Trieste, _April_ 1,1870.
"I suppose 'Sanding the Sugar' reached you too late, or was it that you don't like it? _I_ thought it was good, but needed careful going over again and perhaps enlarging.
"I send you three now, and hope you will like them. I have been days over them, and without getting on, for my poor wife's time of being operated on again draws nigh, and her fear and nervousness have made her seriously ill. For the last three nights I have been sitting up beside her, and as I have been very 'creaky' some time back, this pressure has pushed me very hard indeed.
"Many thanks for 'Piccadilly'; it is beautifully got up, and the style and look of it perfectly faultless. I have re-read it, and like it greatly,--indeed, I think more than the first time. In the little touches of that brusqueness which the well-bred world affects, Oliphant is admirable, and so removed from that low-world dialogue that vulgar novelists imagine people in Society converse in. I am, however, not surprised at the strange step he has taken in life; such extreme fastidiousness could find no rest anywhere but in savagery, just as we see incredulity take refuge in the Church of Rome: _les extremes se touchent_ oftener in life than we suspect."
_To Mr John Blackwood._
"Trieste, _April_ 5, 1870.
"I send you an 'O'Dowd' I hope will please you. I think it has more 'fun' in it than all my late ones,--though, God knows, I never myself felt less disposed to drollery, for I am literally worn out with watching beside my poor sick wife. I cannot bear to read, and it is a blessing to me to run to the pen for distraction.
"The O'D. on Canning has been going the round of the Italian papers, and I see one, the 'Eco de l'Arno,' has given a sort of series of extracts from the O'Ds. called Leverania.
"I see Whiteside is in London. How I wish I could go over! I'd like to have a dinner with you both. You'd be greatly pleased with him.
"I am told that the deadlock about the Education Bill is caused by the opposition of the Irish Catholic bishops, who insist on denominational schools--that is, having the whole grant for themselves. No bad idea after all. I wish every consul, with a bald back to his head, should have double salary.