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_To Mrs. Martin_

Villa Alberti, Siena: September [1859].

My dearest Mrs. Martin,--As you talk of palpitations and the newspapers,
and then tell me or imply that you are confined for light and air to the
'Times' on the Italian question, I am moved with sympathy and compassion
for you, and anxious not to lose a post in answering your letter. My
dear, dear friends, I beseech you to believe _nothing_ which you have
read, are reading, or are likely to read in the 'Times' newspaper,
unless it contradicts all that went before. The criminal conduct of that
paper from first to last, and the immense amount of injury it has
occasioned in the world, make me feel that the hanging of the Smethursts
and Ellen Butlers would be irredeemable cruelty while these writers are
protected by the Law....

Of course you must feel perplexed. The paper takes up different sets of
falsities, quite different and contradictory, and treats them as facts,
and writes 'leaders' on them, as if they were facts. The reader, at
last, falls into a state of confusion, and sees nothing clearly except
that somehow or other, for something that he has done or hasn't done,
has intended or hasn't intended, Louis Napoleon is a rascal, and we
ought to hate him and his.

Well, leave the 'Times'--though from the 'Times' and the like base human
movements in England and Germany resulted, more or less directly, that
peace of Villafranca which threw us all here into so deep an anguish,
that I, for one, have scarcely recovered from it even to this day.

Let me tell you. We were living in a glow of triumph and gratitude; and
for me, it seemed to me as if I walked among the angels of a new-created
world. All faces at Florence shone with one thought and one love. You
can scarcely realise to yourself what it was at that time. Friends were
more than friends, and strangers were friends. The rapture of the
Italians--their gratitude to the French, the simple joy with which the
French troops understood (down to the privates) that they had come to
deliver their brothers, and to go away with empty hands; all these
things, which have been calumniated and denied, were wonderfully
beautiful. Scarcely ever in my life was I so happy. I was happy, not
only for Italy, but for the world--because I thought that this great
deed would beat under its feet all enmities, and lift up England itself
(at last) above its selfish and base policy. Then, on a sudden, came the
pea