Letter from John Meade Falkner, Naples, to Helen Watkins, undated : autograph manuscript signed.

Writing that he is in Italy "for a week or two on business", mentioning that he had an uncomfortable journey to Boulogne and that he went to Rome on the 20th of September for St. Sebastian's Day, where he took a photograph of Guido Remi's painting of the saint, which he describes as "a delightfully squashy piece of sentimentalism", and which he compares to the "squashily sentimental hymns that Dr. Dykes used to charm the Victorians"; remarking that he feared that the picture of St. Sebastian was too scantily clad to send to her, although "I was tempted to send him and Antinous who stood cheek by jowl with him in Alinari and Cook's shop." (a reference to the business of photographer Fratelli Alinari and the English travel agency in Rome); adding that Mr. Cook has had a stroke and is no longer able to "get down to his shop."