As to your ‘science’ of ’turning the necessity of travelling into a luxury,’ my dearest cousin, do let me say that, like some of the occult sciences, it requires a good deal of gold to work out.  Your too generous kindness enabled us to do what we couldn’t certainly have done without it, but nothing would justify us, you know, in not considering the cheapest way of doing things notwithstanding.  So Bradshaw, as I say, tempted us, and the sight of the short cut in the map (pure delusion those maps are!) beguiled us, and we crossed the ‘cold valley’ and the ‘cold mountain’ when we shouldn’t have done either, and we have bought experience and paid for it.  Never mind! experience is nearly always worth its price.  And I have nearly lost my cough, and Robert is dosing me indefatigably with cod’s liver oil to do away with my thinness....

Robert’s best love, with that of your most

Gratefully affectionate
BA.

* * * * *

To Miss I. Blagden

[Florence:  winter 1852-3.]

[The beginning of the letter is lost]

The state of things here in Tuscany is infamous and cruel.  The old serpent, the Pope, is wriggling his venom into the heart of all possibilities of free thought and action.  It is a dreadful state of things.  Austria the hand, the papal power the brain! and no energy in the victim for resistance—­only for hatred.  They do hate here, I am glad to say.

But we linger at Florence in spite of all.  It was delightful to find ourselves in the old nest, still warm, of Casa Guidi, to sit in our own chairs and sleep in our own beds; and here we shall stay as late perhaps as March, if we don’t re-let our house before.  Then we go to Rome and Naples.  You can’t think how we have caught up our ancient traditions just where we left them, and relapsed into our former soundless, stirless hermit life.  Robert has not passed an evening from home since we came—­just as if we had never known Paris.  People come sometimes to have tea and talk with us, but that’s all; a few intelligent and interesting persons sometimes, such as Mr. Tennyson (the poet’s brother) and Mr. Lytton (the novelist’s son) and Mr. Stuart, the lecturer on Shakespeare, whom once I named to you, I fancy.  Mr. Tennyson married an Italian, and has four children.  He has much of the atmosphere poetic about him, a dreamy, speculative, shy man, reminding us of his brother in certain respects; good and pure-minded.  I like him.  Young Mr. Lytton is very young, as you may suppose, with all sorts of high aspirations—­and visionary enough to suit me, which is saying much—­and affectionate, with an apparent liking to us both, which is engaging to us, of course.  We have seen the Trollopes once, the younger ones, but the elder Mrs. Trollope was visible neither at that time nor since....

I sit here reading Dumas’ ‘last,’ notwithstanding.  Dumas is astonishing; he never will write himself out; there’s no dust on his shoes after all this running; his last books are better than his first.