plunging on one side, but at last Mr. Eckley lent us his courier, who sate on the box by the coachman and helped him to manage better.  Then there was a fight between our oxen-drivers, one of them attempting to stab the other with a knife, and Robert rushing in between till Peni and I were nearly frantic with fright.  No harm happened, however, except that Robert had his trousers torn.  And we escaped afterwards certain banditti, who stopped a carriage only the day before on the very road we travelled, and robbed it of sixty-two scudi.

Here at Rome we are still fortunate, for with enormous prices rankling around us we get into our old quarters at eleven pounds a month.  The rooms are smaller than our ambition would fain climb to (one climbs, also, a little too high on the stairs), but on the whole the quiet healthfulness and sunshine are excellent things, particularly in Rome, and we are perfectly contented....

Rome is so full that I am proceeding to lock up my doors throughout the day.  I can’t live without some use of life.  Here must come the break.  May God bless you both!  Pen’s love with mine to the dear nonno and yourself.

BA.

* * * * *

To Mr. Ruskin

Rome, 43 Bocca di Leone:  January 1, 1859.

My dear Mr. Ruskin,—­There is an impulse upon me to write to you, and as it ought to have come long ago, I yield to it, and am glad that it comes on this first day of a new year to inaugurate the time.  It may be a good omen for me.  Who knows?

We received your letter at Florence and very much did it touch me—­us, I should say—­and then I would have written if you hadn’t bade us wait for another letter, which has not come to this day.  Shall I say one thing?  The sadness of that letter struck me like the languor after victory, for you who have fought many good fights and never for a moment seemed to despond before, write this word and this.  After treading the world down in various senses, you are tired.  It is natural perhaps, but this evil will pass like other evils, and I wish you from my heart a good clear noble year, with plenty of work, and God consciously over all to give you satisfaction.  What would this life be, dear Mr. Ruskin, if it had not eternal relations?  For my part, if I did not believe so, I should lay my head down and die.  Nothing would be worth doing, certainly.  But I am what many people call a ‘mystic,’ and what I myself call a ‘realist,’ because I consider that every step of the foot or stroke of the pen here has some real connection with and result in the hereafter.

‘This life’s a dream, a fleeting show!’ no indeed.  That isn’t my ‘doxy.’  I don’t think that nothing is worth doing, but that everything is worth doing—­everything good, of course—­and that everything which does good for a moment does good for ever, in art as well as in morals.  Not that I look for arbitrary punishment or reward (the last least, certainly.  I would no more impute merit to the human than your Spurgeon would), but that I believe in a perpetual sequence, according to God’s will, and in what has been called a ‘correspondence’ between the natural world and the spiritual.