to me.

Dearest Isa, Robert tore me from my last sentence to you. I was going to
say that I cared less for the attacks of the press on my book than I
care for your sympathy. Thank you for feeling 'mad' for me. But be sane
again. Dear, it's not worth being mad for.

In the advertised 'Blackwood,' do you see an article called 'Poetic
Aberration'? It came into my head that it might be a stone thrown at me,
and Robert went to Monaldini's to glance at it. Sure enough it is a
stone. He says a violent attack. And let me do him justice. It was only
the misstatement in the 'Athenaeum' which overset him, only the first
fire which made him wink. Now he turns a hero's face to all this
cannonading. He doesn't care a straw, he says, and what's more, he
doesn't, really. So I, who was only sorry for him, can't care. Observe,
Isa, if there had been less violence and more generosity, the poems
would obviously have been less deserved.

The English were not always so thin-skinned. Lord Byron and Moore
have....

[_The rest of the letter is lost_]

* * * * *

_To Miss I. Blagden_

Rome: April 2, [1860].

Ever dearest Isa,--Here are the letters! I am sorry I wrote rashly
yesterday; but from an expression of yours I took for granted that the
packet went by the post; and I have been really very anxious about it.

No, Isa; I don't like the tone of these letters so well. I can
understand that what is said of Belgium and the Rhine provinces is in
the event of a certain coalition and eventual complication, but it
doesn't do, even in a thought and theory, to sacrifice a country like
Belgium. I respect France, and 'l'idee Napoleonienne'; yes, but
conscience and the populations more.

As to Napoleon's waiting for the bribe of Savoy before he would pass
beyond Villafranca, this is making him ignoble; and I do not believe it
in the least. Also it contradicts the letter-writer's previous letter,
in which he said that Savoy had been from the beginning the _sous
entendre_ of Venetia. No, I can see that an Italy in unity, a great
newly constituted nation, might be reasonably asked by her liberator to
shift her frontier from beyond the Alps, but for Victor Emmanuel to be
expected at Milan to put his hand into his pocket and pay, without
completion of facts, or consultation of peoples, this would be to 'faire
le marchand' indeed, and I could write no odes to a man who could act
so. I don't sell my soul to Napoleo