escia by a brief attack of fever. She
mentions with interest the bust of the celebrated mathematician, Maria
Gaetana Agnesi, preserved in the Ambrosian Library. Among her new
acquaintances here were some young Italian radicals, "interested in
ideas."

The Italian Lakes and Switzerland came next in the order of her travels.
Her Swiss tour she calls "a little romance by itself," promising to
give, at a later date, a description of it, which we fail to find
anywhere. Returning from it, she passed a fortnight at Como, and saw
something of the Italian nobility, who pass their summers on its shores.
Here she enjoyed the society of the accomplished Marchesa Arconati
Visconti, whom she had already met in Florence, and who became to her a
constant and valued friend.

Margaret found no exaggeration in the enthusiasm expressed by poets and
artists for the scenery of this lake region. The descriptions of it
given by Goethe, Richter, and Taylor had not prepared her for what she
saw. Even Turner's pictures had fallen short of the real beauty. At
Lugano she met Lady Franklin, the widow of the Arctic explorer. She
returned to Milan by the 8th of September, in time for the great feast
of the Madonna, and finally left the city "with great regret, and hope
to return." In a letter to her brother Richard she speaks of her
radical friends there as "a circle of aspiring youth, such as I have not
known in any other city." Conspicuous among these was the young Marquis
Guerrieri Gonzaga, commended to her by "a noble soul, the quietest
sensibility, and a brilliant and ardent, though not a great, mind." This
gentleman has to-day a recognized position in Italy as a thoroughly
enlightened and intelligent liberal.

Margaret found among the Milanese, as she must have anticipated, a great
hatred of the Austrian rule, aggravated, at the time of her second
visit, by acts of foolish and useless repression. On the occasion of the
festivals attending the entry of a new archbishop, some youths (among
them possibly Margaret's radical friends) determined to sing the hymn
composed at Rome in honor of Pius IX. The consequence of this was a
charge of the armed Austrian police upon the defenceless crowd of people
present, who, giving way, were stabbed by them in the back. Margaret's
grief and indignation at this state of things made her feel keenly the
general indifference of her own travelling country-people to the
condition and fate of Italy.

"Persons who