“As to the [? criticism] about foreigners and the Continent generally, I assure you I have not the courage to tell the things that have come under my own notice, while foreign notions of England are equally, if not more, ridiculous. I am quite prepared to hear ‘genteel people’ call K. J. very low and his family vulgar, but if so, I am consoled by the fact that it has touched the sore places in some snobbish nature; and in all ranks and conditions of our countrymen snobbery is the great prevailing vice. I am meanwhile amusing myself jotting down on paper the things which have so often afforded me real fun to contemplate in the world,--and so far from high colouring, my great effort is to tone down the picture to the sombre tints of verisimilitude and probability.”
In October the weather made boating a somewhat dangerous pastime. In reply to M’Glashan’s stereotyped complaint that Lever was “huddling his castastrophes,” the novelist playfully replied that “a smashing Levanter” had half-filled his boat with water one day, and “all but closed the career of the author of ‘Sir Jasper Carew’ without a huddle.” He begged M’Glashan to give himself a breathing-time, to clear his head by inhaling some fresh Italian air, to visit Florence and discuss with the author of ‘Sir Jasper’ the best means of putting the hero to bed. But M’Glashan could not be inveigled into the paying of a visit to the novelist; nor could he be induced to furnish Lever with the long letters which at one time had helped to keep him in touch with literary life in Ireland and elsewhere. The fact was that M’Glashan was beginning to break down.
“A very strange, but I fear impracticable, offer has come to me from the United States, which I have sent to O’Sullivan for his counsel, to be then forwarded to John....
“Meanwhile--and to be in a measure prepared for the future--I want you to do a bit of diplomacy for me. My story of ‘Carew’ will finish in March, when ‘The Dodds’ also will close; and as Chapman & Hall contemplate the new issue of my older books, I suspect they will not be disposed to engage me contemporaneously with a new work, so that I shall be suddenly without any engagement in London or Dublin. What I want is, therefore, that you should sound M’Glashan as to a new serial story,--to be published by him both in the Magazine and in monthly numbers, as he did with ‘O’Malley,’ and _with my name_. I want the thing done adroitly, as if the notion originated with you, and so that, if he approved, you could then suggest it to me. If he said Yes, we could then talk of terms. At all events, you could say that an offer of American origin had been made to me, and if this (the serial) could be managed, _you_ would rather have it than the Transatlantic project.”