According to your letters, Venetia seems pushed off into the future a little, don’t you think?

Still, they are interesting, very.  Get Dall’ Ongaro to remember me in future.  The details about Antonelli shall go to him.  I am delighted at the idea of being translated by him....

Write to me, my dearly loved Isa.  You who are true! let me touch you!

Yours ever from the heart
BA.

* * * * *

To Miss I. Blagden

28 Via del Tritone:  Monday and Tuesday [April 1860].

Ever dearest Isa,—­I send you under this enclosure an abstract of some papers given to me by somebody who can’t be named, with a sketch of Antonelli.  I wasn’t allowed to copy; I was only to abstract.  But everything is in.  The whole has been verified and may be absolutely relied on, I hear.  So long I have waited for them.  Should I have translated them into Italian, I wonder?  Or can Dall’ Ongaro get to the bottom of them so?  Dates of birth are not mentioned, I observe.  From another quarter I may get those.  About has the character of romancing a little.

Not a word do you say of your health.  Do another time.  Remember that your previous letter left you in bed.

Dearest Isa, how it touched me, your putting away the ‘Saturday Review’!  But dear, don’t care more for me than I do for myself.  That very Review, lent to us, we lent to the Storys.  Dear, the abuse of the press is the justification of the poems; so don’t be reserved about these attacks.  I was a little, little vexed by a letter this morning from my brother George; but pazienza, we must bear these things.  Robert called yesterday on Odo Russell, who observed to him that the article in the ‘Saturday Review’ was infamous, and that the general tone of the newspaper had grown to be so offensive, he should cease to take it in. (Not on my account, observe.) ‘But,’ said Mr. Russell, ’it’s extraordinary, the sensation your wife’s book has made.  Every paper I see has something to say about it,’ added he; ’it is curious.  The offence has been less in the objections to England than in the praise of Napoleon.  Certainly Monckton Milnes said a good thing when he was asked lately in Paris what, after all, you English wanted. “We want” he answered, “first, that the Austrians should beat you French thoroughly; next, we want that the Italians should be free, and then we want them to be very grateful to us for doing nothing towards it.” This, concluded Russell, ‘sums up the whole question.’  Mark, he is very English, but he can’t help seeing what lies before him, having quick perceptions, moreover.  Then men have no courage.  Milnes, for instance, keeps his sarcasm for Paris, and in England supports his rifle club and all Parliamentary decencies.

Mind you read ‘Blackwood.’  Though I was rather vexed by George’s letter (he is awfully vexed) I couldn’t help laughing at my sister Henrietta, who accepts the interpretation of the ‘Athenaeum’ (having read the poems) and exclaims, ’But, oh, Ba, such dreadful curses!’...