I myself am not very well.  I thought I was going to have a bad attack of the oppression, but this morning it seems to have almost gone, and without a blister!  I had one night very bad.  Probably a sudden call from the tramontana brought it; even frost we had.  Only, on the whole, and considering accounts from other places, Rome has distinguished itself for mildness this year; and I hope I shall keep from bad attacks, having not much strength in body, nerve, or spirit to bear up resistingly against them....

Sir John Bowring has been to see us.  Yes, he speaks with great authority and conviction, and it carries the more emphasis because he is not without Antigallican prejudice, I observed.  He told me that the panic in England about invasion had reached, at one time, a point of phrenzy which would be scarcely credible to anyone who had not witnessed it.  People were in terrors, expecting their houses to be burnt and sacked directly.  Placards of the most inflammatory character, calling passionately on the riflemen to arm, arm, arm!  He himself was hissed at Edinburgh for venturing to say that the rifle-locks would be very rusty if only used against invading Napoleons.

He told me that the Emperor’s intentions towards Italy had been undeviatingly ignored, and that whatever had seemed equivocal had been misunderstood, or was the consequence of misunderstanding, or of the press of some otherwise great difficulty.  The Italian question was only beginning to be understood in England.  I said (in my sarcastic way) that at first they had seemed to understand it upside down.  To which he replied that when, at the opening of the Revolution, he came over with several English officers from India, they were all prepared (in case England didn’t fight on the Hapsburg side) to enter the Austrian army as volunteers to help them to keep down Italy.

But men like Mr. Trollope find it easy to ignore all this.  It is we who have done the most for Italy—­we who did nothing!  Yes, I admit so far.  We abstained from helping the Austrians with an open force.

That now we wish well to the Italian cause is true, I hope, but, at best, it is a noble inconsistency; and that we should set up a claim to a nation’s gratitude on these grounds seems to me worse than absurd.  The more we are in earnest now, the more ashamed we should be for what has been.

I have been sorry about Gaeta;[93] but there is somewhere a cause, and, perhaps, not hard to find.  That the Emperor is ready to do for Italy whatever will not sacrifice France, I am convinced more than ever.  And even the Romans (who have benefited least) think so.  One of the patriots here, a watchmaker, was saying to Ferdinando the other day that he had subscribed to Garibaldi’s fund, and had given his name for Viterbo,[94] but that there was one man in whom he believed most, and never ceased to believe—­Louis Napoleon.  And this is the common feeling.  Mr. Trollope said that they only ventured to unbosom themselves to the English.  Now my belief is that the Italians seldom do this to the English, as far as Napoleon is concerned.  The Italians are furbi assai, and wish to conciliate us, and are perfectly aware of our national jealousies.  I myself have observed the difference in an Italian when speaking to my own husband before me and speaking to me alone.