“I wonder Bulwer Lytton did not guess me, and I wonder even more that he liked T. B.; but I am well pleased all the same.
“So you are coming round to M’Caskey. I half thought you would, and said little in his defence. It certainly is not easy for any one not ‘bog-born’ to understand that composite animal which Ireland produces, and has so much of the gentleman through a regularly demoralised scampish nature: the _point d’honneur_ preserved after honour itself was gone, and the tradition of being respectable maintained after years of a sponging-house and the police-courts. Believe me, I know full fifty M’Caskeys, and one of them became a Chief Justice, though I don’t mean mine to end that way.
“My very warmest thanks for yours and Mrs Blackwood’s inquiries about my wife. She is a little better,--at least she says so, and that is something,--and she was very grateful about your interest for her.”
“I like the notion you suggest of my cancelling. Did you ever see an Irishman throw out a pint of his chalk mixture because he saw a bluebottle in the measure? Or, rather, didn’t he daintily pick out the beastie, aye, if it was a cockroach, with finger and thumb, and serve his customer? I tell you I couldn’t afford to be careful. I’m not rich enough, to write creditably,--_e poi?_ I never could bring myself yet, nor do I hope to arrive at the point hereafter, to respect my Public; and I often hug myself, in the not very profitable consolation, that they never thought meaner of me nor do I of them. I _know_ that the very worst things I ever did were instant successes, and some one or two--as ‘The Dodds,’ for instance, which had a certain stamp of originality--were total and lamentable failures. Now, mind, I do not say this in any spirit of misanthropic invective. I do not want, like poor Haydn, to slang the world that refuses to appreciate me--and, for this reason, that they have taken carrion from me and eaten it for good wholesome ox beef; but I say that for such consumers the trouble of selection is clean thrown away, and I feel that if I were to write for Fame, I might finish my book in the Fleet.
“My wife is certainly better; the change is not so great as to alter her habits of rest and seclusion, but she is better, and looks better. Ju and Syd well, and, like all of us, very much yours.