The octogenarian Bewicke Blackburne to Alfred Tennyson, 6 August 1891: '"Long life to your honour," as Irish peasants used to say, and so say I, the man who was working the State quarry, on the Island of Valencia, when you spent a few days there in 1848, Chartist times in London and Fenian times in Ireland [...] Your sonorous reading to us after dinner sundry truculent passages in Daniel O'Connell's History of Ireland, which happened to be lying on my table, has lingered in my ears ever since. Seeing among my few books all that your friend Carlyle had up to that time published, you told me you thought he had nothing more to say. I was often reminded of this whilst reading his subsequent Cromwell and Frederick and Latter Days, and how near that was to the truth.'