I sent you today by express the picture of Lord Bacon by Vandyck I mentioned some little time ago.1 I hope you will like it. It is the only picture of Bacon I ever saw without the hat. I felt surer than ever when I saw that Olympian forehead that this was the syr_kc.00062.jpg author of Shakespeare.
I wish the picture was a steel engraving, instead of wood, but it was the only one eligible.
Give it a place on your wall.
The Manhattan is going to be revived shortly and is to print my paper, called "Hamlet's Note-Book", the one giving R. G. White a going over,2 of which I wrote syr_kc.00063.jpg you some time ago. The editor writes me a letter so unqualified in panegyric of the article that I am astonished.
I am just having a temporary respite from the worst spell of work ever laid on me. Soon it will begin again.
Faithfully, W.D. O'Connor. Walt Whitman.Correspondent:
William Douglas O'Connor
(1832–1889) was the author of the grand and grandiloquent Whitman pamphlet
The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, published in 1866.
For more on Whitman's relationship with O'Connor, see Deshae E. Lott, "O'Connor, William Douglas (1832–1889)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).