in the mass.  As if the hope of the world did not always consist in the eliciting of the individual man from the background of the masses, in the evolvement of individual genius, virtue, magnanimity.  Do you know how I love France and the French?  Robert laughs at me for the mania of it, or used to laugh long before this revolution.  When I was a prisoner, my other mania for imaginative literature used to be ministered to through the prison bars by Balzac, George Sand, and the like immortal improprieties.  They kept the colour in my life to some degree and did good service in their time to me, I can assure you, though in dear discreet England women oughtn’t to confess to such reading, I believe, or you told me so yourself one day.  Well, but through reading the books I grew to love France, in a mania too; and the interest, which all must feel in the late occurrences there, has been with me, and is, quite painful.  I read the newspapers as I never did in my life, and hope and fear in paroxysms, yes, and am guilty of thinking far more of Paris than of Lombardy itself, and try to understand financial difficulties and social theories with the best will in the world; much as Flush tries to understand me when I tell him that barking and jumping may be unseasonable things.  Both of us open our eyes a good deal, but the comprehension is questionable after all.  What, however, I do seem least of all to comprehend, is your hymn of triumph in England, just because you have a lower ideal of liberty than the French people have.  See if in Louis Philippe’s time France was not in many respects more advanced than England is now, property better divided, hereditary privilege abolished!  Are we to blow with the trumpet because we respect the ruts while everywhere else they are mending the roads?  I do not comprehend.  As to the Chartists, it is only a pity in my mind that you have not more of them.  That’s their fault.  Mine, you will say, is being pert about politics when you would rather have anything else in a letter from Italy.  You have heard of my illness, and will have been sorry for me, I am certain; but with blessings edging me round, I need not catch at a thistle in the hedge to make a ‘sorrowful complaignte’ of.  Our plans have floated round and round, in and out of all the bays and creeks of the Happy Islands....

Meanwhile here we are—­and when do you mean to come to see us, pray?  Mind, I hold by the skirts of the vision for next winter.  Why, surely you won’t talk of ‘disturbances’ and ‘revolutions,’ and the like disloyal reasons which send our brave countrymen flying on all sides, as if every separate individual expected to be bombarded per se.  Now, mind you come; dear dear Mr. Kenyon, how delighted past expression we should be to see you!  Ah, do you fancy that I have no regret for our delightful gossips?  If I have the feeling I told you of for Balzac and George Sand, what must I have for you?  Now come, and let us see you!  And still sooner,