of gifts, though I fear that neither of them will make way in that particular department of literature selected by them for action.  Oh, my dearest friend, you may talk about coteries, but the English society at Florence (from what I hear of the hum of it at a distance) is worse than any coterie-society in the world.  A coterie, if I understand the thing, is informed by a unity of sentiment, or faith, or prejudice; but this society here is not informed at all.  People come together to gamble or dance, and if there’s an end, why so much the better; but there’s not an end in most cases, by any manner of means, and against every sort of innocence.  Mind, I imply nothing about Mr. Lever, who lives irreproachably with his wife and family, rides out with his children in a troop of horses to the Cascine, and yet is as social a person as his joyous temperament leads him to be.  But we live in a cave, and peradventure he is afraid of the damp of us—­who knows?  We know very few residents in Florence, and these, with chance visitors, chiefly Americans, are all that keep us from solitude; every now and then in the evening somebody drops in to tea.  Would, indeed, you were near! but should I be satisfied with you ‘once a week,’ do you fancy.  Ah, you would soon love Robert.  You couldn’t help it, I am sure.  I should be soon turned down to an underplace, and, under the circumstances, would not struggle.  Do you remember once telling me that ’all men are tyrants’?—­as sweeping an opinion as the Apostle’s, that ’all men are liars.’  Well, if you knew Robert you would make an exception certainly.  Talking of the artistical English here, somebody told me the other day of a young Cambridge or Oxford man who deducted from his researches in Rome and Florence that ‘Michael Angelo was a wag.’  Another, after walking through the Florentine galleries, exclaimed to a friend of mine, ’I have seen nothing here equal to those magnificent pictures in Paris by Paul de Kock.’  My friend humbly suggested that he might mean Paul de la Roche.  But see what English you send us for the most part.  We have had one very interesting visitor lately, the grandson of Goethe.  He did us the honour, he said, of spending two days in Florence on our account, he especially wishing to see Robert on account of some sympathy of view about ‘Paracelsus.’  There can scarcely be a more interesting young man—­quite young he seems, and full of aspiration of the purest kind towards the good and true and beautiful, and not towards the poor laurel crowns attainable from any possible public.  I don’t know when I have been so charmed by a visitor, and indeed Robert and I paid him the highest compliment we could, by wishing, one to another, that our little Wiedeman might be like him some day.  I quite agree with you about the church of your Henry.  It surprises me that a child of seven years should find pleasure even once a day in the long English service—­too long, according to my doxy, for matured years.