day to Mrs. Story:  ’I had a delightful evening yesterday at your house.  I never spoke to you once,’ and encouraged an artist, who was ’quite dissatisfied with his works,’ as he said humbly, by an encouraging—­’But, my dear fellow, if you were satisfied, you would be so very easily satisfied!’ Happy! wasn’t it?) Well, so I exhorted my Robert to eschew compliments and keep to Italian politics, and we both laughed, as at a jest.  But really he had an opportunity, the subject was permitted, admitted, encouraged, and Robert swears that he talked on it higher than his breath.  But, oh, the English, the English!  I am unpatriotic and disloyal to a crime, Isa, just now.  Besides which, as a matter of principle, I never put my trust in princes, except in the parvenus.

Not that the little prince here talked politics.  But some of his suite did, and he listened.  He is a gentle, refined boy, Robert says....

May God bless you, dearest Isa.  I am, your very loving

BA.

* * * * *

To Miss Browning

Rome:  [about April 1859].

Dearest Sarianna,—­People are distracting the ‘Athenaeums,’ Robert complains, as they distract other things, but in time you will recover them, I hope.  Mr. Leighton has made a beautiful pencil-drawing, highly finished to the last degree, of him;[64] very like, though not on the poetical side, which is beyond Leighton.  Of this you shall have a photograph soon; and in behalf of it, I pardon a drawing of me which I should otherwise rather complain of, I confess.

We are all much saddened just now (in spite of war) by the state of Una Hawthorne, a lovely girl of fifteen, Mr. Hawthorne’s daughter, who, after a succession of attacks of Roman fever, has had another, complicated with gastric, which has fallen on the lungs, and she only lives from hour to hour.  Homoeopathic treatment persisted in, which never answers in these fevers.  Ah—­there has been much illness in Rome.  Miss Cushman has had an attack, but you would not recognise other names.  We are well, however, Pen like a rose, and Robert still expanding.  Dissipations decidedly agree with Robert, there’s no denying that, though he’s horribly hypocritical, and ’prefers an evening with me at home,’ which has grown to be a kind of dissipation also.

We are in great heart about the war, as if it were a peace, without need of war.  Arabel writes alarmed about our funded money, which we are not likely to lose perhaps, precisely because we are not alarmed.  The subject never occurred to me, in fact.  I was too absorbed in the general question—­yes, and am.