It’s comfort and pleasure after all to have a good account of you both, my very dear friends, even though one knows by it that you have been sending one ‘al diavolo’ for weeks or months.  Forgive me, do.  I feel guilty somehow to the extreme degree, that four letters should have been written to me, even though I received none of them, because I ought to have written at least one letter in that time.

Your politics would be my politics on most points; we should run together more than halfway, if we could stand side by side, in spite of all your vindictiveness to N. III.  My hero—­say you?  Well, I have more belief in him than you have.  And what is curious, and would be unaccountable, I suppose, to English politicians in general, the Italian democrats of the lower classes, the popular clubs in Florence, are clinging to him as their one hope.  Ah, here’s oppression! here’s a people trodden down!  You should come here and see.  It is enough to turn the depths of the heart bitter.  The will of the people forced, their instinctive affections despised, their liberty of thought spied into, their national life ignored altogether.  Robert keeps saying, ’How long, O Lord, how long?’ Such things cannot last, surely.  Oh, this brutal Austria!

I myself expect help from Louis Napoleon, though scarcely in the way that the clubs are said to do.  When I talk of a club, of course I mean a secret combination of men—­young men who meet to read forbidden newspapers and talk forbidden subjects.  He won’t help the Mazzinians, but he will do something for Italy, you will see.  The Cardinals feel it, and that’s why they won’t let the Pope go to Paris.  We shall see.  I seem to catch sight of the grey of dawn even in the French Government papers, and am full of hope.

As to Mazzini, he is a noble man and an unwise man.  Unfortunately the epithets are compatible.  Kossuth is neither very noble nor very wise.  I have heard and felt a great deal of harm of him.  The truth is not in him.  And when a patriot lies like a Jesuit, what are we to say?

For England—­do you approve of the fleet staying on at Malta?  We are prepared to do nothing which costs us a halfpenny for a less gain than three farthings—­always excepting the glorious national defences, which have their end too, though not the one generally attributed....

God bless you, my dear, dear friends!  Care in your thoughts for us all!

Your ever affectionate
BA.

* * * * *

To John Kenyon

Casa Guidi:  May 16 [1853].

My dearest Mr. Kenyon,—­You are to be thanked and loved as ever, and what can we say more?  This:  Do be good to us by a supererogatory virtue and write to us.  You can’t know how pleasant it is to be en rapport with you, though by holding such a fringe of a garment as a scrap of letter is.  We don’t see you, we don’t hear you!  ‘Rap’ to us with the end of