Here, an end.  I hope you will write to me some day, and ease me by proving to me that I have ceased to be bitter to the palate of your soul.  Believe this—­that, rather than be a serious sadness to you, I would gladly sit on in the pillory under the aggressive mud of that mob of ‘Saturday Reviewers,’ who take their mud and their morals from the same place, and use voices hoarse with hooting down un-English poetesses, to cheer on the English champion, Tom Sayers.  For me, I neither wish for the ’belt’[78] nor martyrdom; but if I were ambitious of anything, it might be to be wronged where, for instance, Cavour is wronged.

* * * * *

To Miss I. Blagden

[Rome], Friday [end of March 1860].

My ever dearest Isa, I am scarcely in heart yet for writing letters, and did not mean to write to-day.  You heard of the unexpected event which brought me the loss of a very dear friend, dear, dear Mrs. Jameson.[79] It was, of course, a shock to me, as such things are meant to be....

And now I come to what makes me tax you with a dull letter, I feeling so dully; and, dear, it is with dismay I have to tell you that the letter you addressed under cover to Mr. Russell has never reached us.  Till your last communication (this moment received), I had hoped that the contents of it might have been less important than O.-papers must be.  What is to be done, or thought?  I beseech you to write and tell me if harm is likely to follow from this seizure.  The other inclosure came to me quite safely, because it came by the Government messenger.  I think you sent it through Corbet.  But Mr. Russell’s post letters are as liable to opening as mine are; his name is no security.  Whenever you send a ‘Nazione’ newspaper through him, it never reaches us, though we receive our ‘Monitore’ through him regularly.  Why?  Because in his position he is allowed to have newspapers for his own use.  He takes in for himself no ‘Monitore,’ so ours goes to his account, but he does take in a ‘Nazione,’ therefore ours is seized, as being plainly for other hands than his own licensed ones.

I am very much grieved about this loss of your letter and its contents.  First, there’s my fear lest harm should come of this, and then there’s my own personal mulcting of what would have been of such deep interest to me.  I am ‘revelling’?  See how little.

Robert wrote in a playful vein to Kate, and you must not and will not care for that.  He had understood from your letter that you and the majority had all, like the ‘Athenaeum,’ understood the ’Curse for a Nation’ to be directed against England.  Robert was furious about the ‘Athenaeum’; no other word describes him, and I thought that both I and Mr. Chorley would perish together, seeing that even the accusation (such a one!) made me infamous, it seemed.

The curious thing is, that it was at Robert’s suggestion that that particular poem was reprinted there (it never had appeared in England), though ‘Barkis was willing’; I had no manner of objection.  I never have to justice.