blushing, for it is not by me. It was done by Wilkie Collins."

Here is another short note, not a little gratifying to me personally,
but not without interest of a larger kind to the reader:--

* * * * *

"_Tuesday, 15th November, 1859._

"MY DEAR TROLLOPE,--I write this hasty word, just as the post leaves,
to ask you this question, which this moment occurs to me.

"Montalembert, in his suppressed treatise, asks, 'What wrong has Pope
Pius the Ninth done?' Don't you think you can very pointedly answer
that question in these pages? If you cannot, nobody in Europe can.
Very faithfully yours always,

"CHARLES DICKENS"

* * * * *

Some, some few, may remember the interest excited by the treatise to
which the above letter refers. No doubt I could, and doubtless did,
though I forget all about it, answer the question propounded by the
celebrated French writer. But there was little hope of my doing it
as "pointedly" as my correspondent would have done it himself. The
answer, which might well have consisted of a succinct statement of all
the difficulties of the position with which Italy was then struggling,
had to confine itself to the limits of an article in _All The Year
Round_, and needed in truth to be pointed. I have observed that, in
all our many conversations on Italian matters, Dickens's views and
opinions coincided with my own, without, I think, any point of
divergence. Very specially was this the case as regards all that
concerned the Vatican and the doings of the Curia. How well I remember
his arched eyebrows and laughing eyes when I told him of Garibaldi's
proposal that all priests should be summarily executed! I think
it modified his ideas of the possible utility of Garibaldi as a
politician.

Then comes an invitation to "my Falstaff house at Gadshill."

Here is a letter of the 17th February, 1866, which I will give _in
extenso_, bribed again by the very flattering words in which the
writer speaks of our friendship:--

* * * * *

"MY DEAR TROLLOPE,--I am heartily glad to hear from you. It was such
a disagreeable surprise to find that you had left London" [I had been
called away at an hour's notice] "on the occasion of your last visit
without my having seen you, that I have never since got it out of my
mind. I felt as if it were my fault (though I don't know how that can
have been), and as if I had somehow been