book is out at last, hurried through the press in a fortnight,—­a process which half killed me, and has left the volumes, no doubt, full of errata,—­and you, I mean your house, have not got it.  I am keeping a copy for you personally.  People say that they like it.  I think you will, because it will remind you of this pretty country, and of an old Englishwoman who loves you well.  Mrs. Browning was delighted with your visit.  She is a Bonapartiste; so am I. I always adored the Emperor, and I think his nephew is a great man, full of ability, energy, and courage, who put an end to an untenable situation and got quit of a set of unrepresenting representatives.  The Times newspaper, right as it seems to me about Kossuth, is dangerously wrong about Louis Napoleon, since it is trying to stimulate the nation to a war for which France is more than prepared, is ready, and England is not.  London might be taken with far less trouble and fewer men than it took to accomplish the coup d’etat.  Ah!  I suspect very different politics will enclose this wee bit notie, if dear Mr. Bennoch contrives to fold it up in a letter of his own; but to agree to differ is part of the privileges of friendship; besides, I think you and I generally agree.

    Ever yours,

    M.R.M.

P.S.  All this time I have not said a word of “The Wonder Book.”  Thanks again and again.  Who was the Mr. Blackstone mentioned in “The Scarlet Letter” as riding like a myth in New England History, and what his arms?  A grandson of Judge Blackstone, a friend of mine, wishes to know.

    (March, 1852.)

I can never enough thank you, dearest Mr. Fields, for your kind recollection of me in such a place as the Eternal City.  But you never forget any whom you make happy in your friendship, for that is the word; and therefore here in Europe or across the Atlantic, you will always remain....  Your anecdote of the ——­ is most characteristic.  I am very much afraid that he is only a poet, and although I fear the last person in the world to deny that that is much, I think that to be a really great man needs something more.  I am sure that you would not have sympathized with Wordsworth.  I do hope that you will see Beranger when in Paris.  He is the one man in France (always excepting Louis Napoleon, to whom I confess the interest that all women feel in strength and courage) whom I should earnestly desire to know well.  In the first place, I think him by far the greatest of living poets, the one who unites most completely those two rare things, impulse and finish.  In the next, I admire his admirable independence and consistency, and his generous feeling for fallen greatness.  Ah, what a truth he told, when he said that Napoleon was the greatest poet of modern days!  I should like to have the description of Beranger from your lips.  Mrs. Browning ... has made acquaintance with Madame Sand, of whom her account is most striking