I have already in a previous chapter of these reminiscences given a letter from Mrs. Browning in which she speaks of Theodosia’s “multiform faculty.”  And the phrase, which so occurring, might in the case of almost any other writer be taken as a mere epistolary civility, is in the case of one whose absolute accuracy of veracity never swerved a hair’s-breadth, equivalent to a formal certificate of the fact to the best of her knowledge.  And she knew my wife well both before and after the marriage of either of them.  Her faculty was truly multiform.

She was not a great musician; but her singing had for great musicians a charm which the performances of many of their equals in the art failed to afford them.  She had never much voice, but I have rarely seen the hearer to whose eyes she could not bring the tears.  She had a spell for awakening emotional sympathy which I have never seen surpassed, rarely indeed equalled.

For language she had an especial talent, was dainty in the use of her own, and astonishingly apt in acquiring—­not merely the use for speaking as well as reading purposes, but—­the delicacies of other tongues.  Of Italian, with which she was naturally most conversant, she was recognised by acknowledged experts to be a thoroughly competent critic.

She published, now many years ago, in the Athenaeum, some translations from the satirist Giusti, which any intelligent reader would, I think, recognise to be cleverly done.  But none save the very few in this country, who know and can understand the Tuscan poet’s works in the original, can at all conceive the difficulty of translating him into tolerable English verse.  And I have no hesitation in asserting, that any competent judge, who is such by virtue of understanding the original, would pronounce her translations of Giusti to be a masterpiece, which very few indeed of contemporary men or women could have produced.  I have more than once surprised her in tears occasioned by her obstinate struggles with some passage of the intensely idiomatic satirist, which she found it almost—­but eventually not quite—­impossible to render to her satisfaction.

She published a translation of Niccolini’s Arnaldo da Brescia, which won the cordial admiration and friendship of that great poet.  And neither Niccolini’s admiration nor his friendship were easily won.  He was, when we knew him at Florence in his old age, a somewhat crabbed old man, not at all disposed to make new acquaintances, and, I think, somewhat soured and disappointed, not certainly with the meed of admiration he had won from his countrymen as a poet, but with the amount of effect which his writings had availed to produce in the political sentiments and then apparent destinies of the Italians.  But he was conquered by the young Englishwoman’s translation of his favourite, and, I think, his finest work.  It is a thoroughly trustworthy and excellent translation; but the execution of it was child’s play in comparison with the translations from Giusti.