Robert and I began to write on the Italian question together, and our plan was (Robert’s own suggestion!) to publish jointly.  When I showed him my ode on Napoleon he observed that I was gentle to England in comparison to what he had been, but after Villafranca (the Palmerston Ministry having come in) he destroyed his poem and left me alone, and I determined to stand alone.  What Robert had written no longer suited the moment; but the poetical devil in me burnt on for an utterance.  I have spoken nothing but historical truths, as far as the outline is concerned.  But the spirit of the whole, is, of course, opposed to the national feeling, or I should not in my preface suppose it to be offended.

With every deference to you, dearest Sarianna, I cannot think that you who live, as the English usually do, quite aside and apart from French society, can judge of the interest in France for Italy.  I see French letters—­letters of French men and women—­giving a very contrary impression.  The French newspapers give a very contrary impression.  And the statistics of books and pamphlets published and circulated in France on the Italian question this year are in most prodigious disaccord with such a conclusion.  Compare them with the same statistics in England, and then judge.

Besides, the English, to do them justice, can be active and generous in any cause in which they are really interested, and it is a fact that we could not get up a subscription in England even for Garibaldi’s muskets lately, while France is always giving.

Not that there are not, and have not been, many English of generous sympathies towards Italy.  That I well know.  But it is a small, protesting minority.  Lord John has done very well, as far as words can go, but it has been simply in giving effect to the intentions of France, who wanted much a respectable conservative Power like England to endorse her bill of revolution with the retrograde European Governments.

I will spare what I think of the treatment in England of the Savoy question.  We are losing all moral prestige in the eyes of the world, with our small jealousies and factional struggles for power.

Ah! dear Sarianna, I don’t complain for myself of an unappreciating public—­I have no reason.  But, just for that reason, I complain more about Robert, only he does not hear me complain.  To you I may say, that the blindness, deafness, and stupidity of the English public to Robert are amazing.  Of course Milsand had ‘heard his name’!  Well, the contrary would have been strange.  Robert is.  All England can’t prevent his existence, I suppose.  But nobody there, except a small knot of pre-Raffaelite men, pretends to do him justice.  Mr. Forster has done the best in the press.  As a sort of lion, Robert has his range in society, and, for the rest, you should see Chapman’s returns; while in America he’s a power, a writer, a poet.  He is read—­he lives in the hearts of the people.  ‘Browning