[My] very dear friends, how am I to thank [you] both?  I receive the photograph with a heart running over.  It is perfect.  Never could a likeness be more satisfactory.  It is himself.  Form, expression, the whole man and soul, on which years cannot leave the least dint of a tooth.  The youthfulness is extraordinary.  We are all crying out against our ‘black lines’ (laying them all to the sun of course!) and even pretty women of our acquaintance in Rome come out with some twenty years additional on their heads, to their great dissatisfaction.  But my dear Mr. Martin is my dear Mr. Martin still, unblacked, unchanged, as when I knew him in the sun long ago, when suns were content to make funny places, instead of drawing pictures!  How good of dearest Mrs. Martin (it was she, I think!) to send this to me!  I wish she (or he) had sent me hers besides. (How grasping some of us are!)

Then she sent me a short time since a book for my Peni, which he seized on with blazing eyes and an exclamation, ‘Oh, what fun!’ A work by his great author, Mayne Reid, who outshines all other authors, unless it’s Robinson Crusoe, who, of course, wrote his own life.  It was so very very good of you.  Robert had repeatedly tried in Rome to buy a new volume of Mayne Reid for the child, and never could get one.  Our drawback in Rome relates to books.  We subscribe to a French library (not good) and snatch at accidental ‘waifs,’ and then the newspapers (which I intrigue about, and get smuggled through the courteous hands of French generals) are absorbing enough.

I had a letter from George yesterday with good news of dearest Mrs. Martin.  May it be true.  But I can’t understand whether you have spent this winter in Devonshire or Worcestershire, or where.  The thick gloom of it is over now, yet I find myself full of regrets.  It’s so hard to have to get out into the workday world, daylight, open air and all, and there’s a duty on me to go to France, that Robert may see his father.  You would pity me if you could see how I dread it.  Arabel will meet me, and spend at least the summer with us, probably in the neighbourhood of Paris, and after just the first, we—­even I—­may be the happier.  Don’t tell anyone that I feel so.  I should like to go into a cave for the year.  Not that I haven’t taken to work again, and to my old interests in politics.  One doesn’t quite rot in one’s selfishness, after all.  In fact, I think of myself as little as possible; it’s the only way to bear life, to throw oneself out of the personal.

And my Italy goes on well in spite of some Neapolitan troubles, which are exaggerated, I can certify to you.  Rome, according to my information as well as my instincts, approaches the crisis we desire.  In respect to Venetia, we may (perhaps must) have a struggle for it, which might have been unnecessary if England had frankly accepted co-action with France, instead of doing a little liberalism and a great deal of suspicion on her own account.  As it is, there’s an impression in Europe that considerations about the East (to say nothing of the Ionian Islands) will be stronger than Vattel, and forbid our throwing over our ’natural ally’ for the sake of our ‘natural enemy.’