It may possibly enter into the mind of some one of those who never enjoyed the privilege of knowing Mrs. Browning the woman, to couple together the stupidly calumnious insinuations to which she refers in the first letter I have given, with the admiration she expresses for the third Napoleon in the second letter.  I differed from her wholly in her estimate of the man, and in her views of his policy with regard to Italy.  And many an argument have I had with her on the subject.  And my opinions respecting it were all the more distasteful to her because they concerned the character of the man himself as well as his policy as a ruler.  And those talks and arguments have left me probably the only man alive, save one, who knows with such certainty as I know it, and can assert as I can, the absolute absurdity and impossibility of the idea that she, being what she was, could have been bribed by any amount of Imperial or other flattery, not only to profess opinions which she did not veritably hold—­this touches her moral nature, perhaps the most pellucidly truthful of any I ever knew—­but to hold opinions which she would not have otherwise held.  This touches her intellectual nature, which was as incapable of being mystified or modified by any suggestion of vanity, self-love, or gratified pride, as the most judicial-minded judge who ever sat on the bench.  Her intellectual view on the matter was, I thought, mystified and modified by the intensity of her love for the Italian cause, and of her hatred for the evils from which she was watching the Italians struggling to liberate themselves.

I heard, probably from herself, of whispered calumnies, such as those she refers to in the first of the two letters given.  She despised them then, as those who loved and valued her did, though the sensitive womanly gentleness of her nature made it a pain to her that any fellow-creature, however ignorant and far away from her, should so think of her.  And my disgust at a secret attempt to stab has impelled me to say what I know on the subject.  But I really think that not only those who knew her as she lived In the flesh, but the tens of thousands who know her as she lives in her written words, cannot but feel my vindication superfluous.

The above long and specially interesting letter is written in very small characters on ten pages of extremely small duodecimo note-paper, as is also the other letter by the same writer given above.  Mrs. Browning’s handwriting shows ever and anon an odd tendency to form each letter of a word separately—­a circumstance which I mention for the sake of remarking that old Huntingford, the Bishop of Hereford, in my young days, between whom and Mrs. Browning there was one thing in common, namely, a love for and familiarity with Greek studies, used to write in the same manner.