I may say so without 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.