I wonder if the Empress pleases you as well as the Emperor.  For my part, I approve altogether, and none the less that he has offended Austria by the mode of announcement.  Every cut of the whip in the face of Austria is an especial compliment to me—­or, so I feel it.  Let him head the democracy and do his duty to the world, and use to the utmost his great opportunities.  Mr. Cobden and the Peace Society are pleasing me infinitely just now in making head against the immorality (that’s the word) of the English press.  The tone taken up towards France is immoral in the highest degree, and the invasion cry would be idiotic if it were not something worse.  The Empress, I heard the other day from good authority, is ‘charming and good at heart.’  She was educated ’at a respectable school at Bristol’ (Miss Rogers’s, Royal Crescent, Clifton), and is very ‘English,’ which doesn’t prevent her from shooting with pistols, leaping gates, driving ‘four-in-hand,’ and upsetting the carriage when the frolic requires it, as brave as a lion and as true as a dog.  Her complexion is like marble, white, pale and pure; her hair light, rather ‘sandy,’ they say, and she powders it with gold dust for effect; but there is less physical and more intellectual beauty than is generally attributed to her.  She is a woman of ‘very decided opinions.’  I like all that, don’t you? and I liked her letter to the Prefet, as everybody must.  Ah, if the English press were in earnest in the cause of liberty, there would be something to say for our poor trampled-down Italy—­much to say, I mean.  Under my eyes is a people really oppressed, really groaning its heart out.  But these things are spoken of with measure.

We are reading Lamartine and Proudhon on ’48.  We have plenty of French books here; only the poets are to seek—­the moderns.  Do you catch sight of Moore in diary and letters?  Robert, who has had glimpses of him, says the ‘flunkeyism’ is quite humiliating.  It is strange that you have not heard more of the rapping spirits.  They are worth hearing of were it only in the point of view of the physiognomy of the times, as a sign of hallucination and credulity, if not more.  Fifteen thousand persons in all ranks of society, and all degrees of education, are said to be mediums, that is seers, or rather hearers and recipients, perhaps.  Oh, I can’t tell you all about it; but the details are most curious.  I understand that Dickens has caught a wandering spirit in London and showed him up victoriously in ‘Household Words’ as neither more nor less than the ‘cracking of toe joints;’ but it is absurd to try to adapt such an explanation to cases in general.  You know I am rather a visionary, and inclined to knock round at all the doors of the present world to try to get out, so that I listen with interest to every goblin story of the kind, and, indeed, I hear enough of them just now.