The American authoress, Miss Fuller, with whom we had had some slight intercourse by letter, and who has been at Rome during the siege, as a devoted friend of the republicans and a meritorious attendant on the hospitals, has taken us by surprise at Florence, retiring from the Roman field with a husband and child above a year old.  Nobody had even suspected a word of this underplot, and her American friends stood in mute astonishment before this apparition of them here.  The husband is a Roman marquis, appearing amiable and gentlemanly, and having fought well, they say, at the siege, but with no pretension to cope with his wife on any ground appertaining to the intellect.  She talks, and he listens.  I always wonder at that species of marriage; but people are so different in their matrimonial ideals that it may answer sometimes.  This Mdme. Ossoli saw George Sand in Paris—­was at one of her soirees—­and called her ‘a magnificent creature.’  The soiree was ’full of rubbish’ in the way of its social composition, which George Sand likes, nota bene.  If Mdme. Ossoli called it ‘rubbish’ it must have been really rubbish—­not expressing anything conventionally so—­she being one of the out and out Reds and scorners of grades of society.  She said that she did not see Balzac.  Balzac went into the world scarcely at all, frequenting the lowest cafes, so that it was difficult to track him out.  Which information I receive doubtingly.  The rumours about Balzac with certain parties in Paris are not likely to be too favorable nor at all reliable, I should fancy; besides, I never entertain disparaging thoughts of my demi-gods unless they should be forced upon me by evidence you must know.  I have not made a demi-god of Louis Napoleon, by the way—­no, and I don’t mean it.  I expect some better final result than he has just proved himself to be of the French Revolution, with all its bitter and cruel consequences hitherto, so I can’t quite agree with you.  Only so far, that he has shown himself up to this point to be an upright man with noble impulses, and that I give him much of my sympathy and respect in the difficult position held by him.  A man of genius he does not seem to be—­and what, after all, will he manage to do at Rome?  I don’t take up the frantic Republican cry in Italy.  I know too well the want of knowledge and the consequent want of i effective faith and energy among the Italians; but there is a stain upon France in the present state of the Roman affair, and I don’t shut my eyes to that either.  To cast Rome helpless and bound into the hands of the priests is dishonor to the actors, however we consider the act; and for the sake of France, even more than for the sake of Italy, I yearn to see the act cancelled.  Oh, we have had the sight of Clough and Burbidge, at last.  Clough has more thought, Burbidge more music; but I am disappointed in the book on the whole.  What I like infinitely better is Clough’s ‘Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich,’