You have seen by this time Lamoriciere’s[82] address to the Papal array.  It’s extraordinary, while the French are still here, that such a publication should be permitted, obvious as the position taken must be to all, and personally displeasing to the Emperor as the man is known to be.  Magnanimity is certainly a great feature of Napoleon’s mind.  And now what next?  The French are going, of course.  You would suppose an attack on Romagna imminent.  And better so.  Let us have it out at once.

I have the papers.  I am much the better for some things in them.  There’s to be the universal suffrage, the withdrawal of troops, whatever I wanted.  Cavour’s despatch to the Swiss is also excellent.  Those injured martyrs wanted the bone in their teeth, that’s all.

The wailing in England for Swiss and Savoyards, while other nationalities are to be trodden under foot without intervention, except what’s called aggression, is highly irritating to me.

Dearest Isa, Robert tore me from my last sentence to you.  I was going to say that I cared less for the attacks of the press on my book than I care for your sympathy.  Thank you for feeling ‘mad’ for me.  But be sane again.  Dear, it’s not worth being mad for.

In the advertised ‘Blackwood,’ do you see an article called ’Poetic Aberration’?  It came into my head that it might be a stone thrown at me, and Robert went to Monaldini’s to glance at it.  Sure enough it is a stone.  He says a violent attack.  And let me do him justice.  It was only the misstatement in the ‘Athenaeum’ which overset him, only the first fire which made him wink.  Now he turns a hero’s face to all this cannonading.  He doesn’t care a straw, he says, and what’s more, he doesn’t, really.  So I, who was only sorry for him, can’t care.  Observe, Isa, if there had been less violence and more generosity, the poems would obviously have been less deserved.

The English were not always so thin-skinned.  Lord Byron and Moore have....

[The rest of the letter is lost]

* * * * *

To Miss I. Blagden

Rome:  April 2, [1860].

Ever dearest Isa,—­Here are the letters!  I am sorry I wrote rashly yesterday; but from an expression of yours I took for granted that the packet went by the post; and I have been really very anxious about it.

No, Isa; I don’t like the tone of these letters so well.  I can understand that what is said of Belgium and the Rhine provinces is in the event of a certain coalition and eventual complication, but it doesn’t do, even in a thought and theory, to sacrifice a country like Belgium.  I respect France, and ‘l’idee Napoleonienne’; yes, but conscience and the populations more.