and Query’ magazine why the ‘Athenaeum’ does show me so much favor, while, as in a late instance, so little justice is shown to my husband?  It’s a problem, like another.  As for poetry, I hope to do better things in it yet, though I have a child to ‘stand in my sunshine,’ as you suppose he must; but he only makes the sunbeams brighter with his glistening curls, little darling—­and who can complain of that?  You can’t think what a good, sweet, curious, imagining child he is.  Half the day I do nothing but admire him—­there’s the truth.  He doesn’t talk yet much, but he gesticulates with extraordinary force of symbol, and makes surprising revelations to us every half-hour or so.  Meanwhile Flush loses nothing, I assure you.  On the contrary, he is hugged and kissed (rather too hard sometimes), and never is permitted to be found fault with by anybody under the new regime.  If Flush is scolded, Baby cries as matter of course, and he would do admirably for a ‘whipping-boy’ if that excellent institution were to be revived by Young England and the Tractarians for the benefit of our deteriorated generations.  I was ill towards the end of last summer, and we had to go to Siena for the sake of getting strength again, and there we lived in a villa among a sea of little hills, and wrapt up in vineyards and olive yards, enjoying everything.  Much the worst of Italy is, the drawback about books.  Somebody said the other day that we ’sate here like posterity’—­reading books with the gloss off them.  But our case in reality is far more dreary, seeing that Prince Posterity will have glossy books of his own.  How exquisite ‘In Memoriam’ is, how earnest and true; after all, the gloss never can wear off books like that.

And as to your book, it will come, it will come, and meantime I may assure you that posterity is very impatient for it.  The Italian poem will be read with the interest which is natural.  You know it’s a more than doubtful point whether Shakespeare ever saw Italy out of a vision, yet he and a crowd of inferior writers have written about Venice and vineyards as if born to the manner of them.  We hear of Carlyle travelling in France and Germany—­but I must leave room for the words you ask for from a certain hand below.

Ever dear Mr. Westwood’s obliged and faithful

E.B.B.

And the ‘certain hand’ will write its best (and far better than any poor ‘Pippa Passes’) in recording a feeling which does not pass at all, that of gratitude for all such generous sympathy as dear Mr. Westwood’s for E.B.B. and (in his proper degree) R. BROWNING.

To Miss Mitford Florence:  December 13, 1850.