, I believe, substantially the truth. I have heard
that the English dispatch was referred to the French Minister
of Foreign Affairs, and that he advised against it; but this is
impossible. The Emperor of France was more determined even than
Palmerston to destroy the United States, if possible, as his Mexican
enterprise showed, and we knew from other sources that he was pressing
the English government to recognize the belligerency of the South.
Day by day I heard from Mr. Adams of the position, and he said to
me emphatically that he did not consider the declaration of war
impossible until he received the reply of Lincoln to the English
ultimatum; and it is impossible that such a transaction as that of
the consultation with the French government should have taken place
without Adams knowing of it, for his information from the surroundings
of the Queen was minute and incessant. He said to me, without the
slightest qualification, that the preservation of peace was due solely
to the insistence of the Queen, strengthened by the advice of Prince
Albert, on the demand for the release of the envoys being made in
terms which should not offend the _amour propre_ of the North.

CHAPTER XIX

MY ROMAN CONSULATE

The convenient road from London to Rome, when I went there as consul,
was via Paris to Marseilles, and thence by sea to Civita Vecchia.
It was December when I left London, and the journey from Paris to
Marseilles, in a third-class carriage, took twenty-six hours. The Mont
Cenis tunnel had not been opened yet, and the voyage by diligence was
tedious, costly, and at that season uncomfortable on account of the
cold. I arrived at Rome shortly before Christmas, when the city was
astir with the preparations for the great ceremonies which were then
the principal attraction for foreigners there, but the number of
visitors was very small compared with that which now gathers to their
diminished religious and spectacular interest. The foreign quarter was
limited to that immediately about the Piazza di Spagna, and only the
artist folk lived in the remoter quarters, where they found cheap and
commodious apartments in the palaces of fallen nobility, glad to let
their upper stories; and there were few or no new houses.

Rome was given up to art and religion; it was still decaying,
picturesque, pathetic, and majestic. Where now we find the prosperous
and hideous new quarters,--the Via Nazionale, and the expanse of
structures to