her feet, when the Emperor stepped in and carried off the prize.  To comfort himself he has got a portrait of her on horseback, which a friend of mine saw the other day at his house.  Mrs. Browning writes me from Florence:  “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 on the face of Austria is an especial compliment to me, or so I feel it.  Let him heed the democracy, and do his duty to the world, and use to the utmost his great opportunities.  Mr. Cobden and the peace societies 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 high authority, is charming and good at heart.  She was brought up at a respectable school at Clifton, and is very English, which does not prevent her from shooting with pistols, leaping gates, driving four in hand, and upsetting the carriage if the frolic requires it,—­as brave as a lion and as true as a dog.  Her complexion is like marble, white, pale, and pure,—­the 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 like her letter to the press, as everybody must.”  Besides this, I have to-day a letter from a friend in Paris, who says that “everybody feels her charm,” and that “the Emperor, when presenting her at the balcony on the wedding-day, looked radiant with happiness.”  My Parisian friend says that young Alexandre Dumas is amongst the people arrested for libel,—­a thorough mauvais sujet.  Lamartine is quite ruined, and forced to sell his estates.  He was always, I believe, expensive, like all those French litterateurs.  You don’t happen to have in Boston—­have you?—­a copy of “Les Memoires de Lally Tollendal”?  I think they are different publications in defence of his father, published, some in London during the Emigration, some in Paris after the Restoration.  What I want is an account of the retreat from Pondicherie.  I’ll tell you why some day here.  Mrs. Browning is most curious about your rappings,—­of which I suppose you believe as much as I do of the Cock Lane Ghost, whose doings, by the way, they much resemble.

    I liked Mrs. Tyler’s letter; at least I liked it much better than
    the one to which it was an answer, although I hold it one of our
    best female privileges to have no act or part in such matters.

Now you will be sorry to have a very bad account of me.  Three weeks ago frost and snow set in here, and ever since I have been unable to rise or stand, or put one foot before another, and the pain is much worse than at first.  I suppose rheumatism has supervened upon the injured nerve.  God bless you.  Love to all.

    Ever faithfully yours, M.R.M.