Don’t expect Neapolitan Scenery at Pisa, quite in the North, remember.  Mrs. Shelley found Italy for the first time, real Italy, at Sorrento, she says.  Oh that book—­does one wake or sleep?  The ‘Mary dear’ with the brown eyes, and Godwin’s daughter and Shelley’s wife, and who surely was something better once upon a time—­and to go through Rome and Florence and the rest, after what I suppose to be Lady Londonderry’s fashion:  the intrepidity of the commonplace quite astounds me.  And then that way, when she and the like of her are put in a new place, with new flowers, new stones, faces, walls, all new—­of looking wisely up at the sun, clouds, evening star, or mountain top and wisely saying ’who shall describe that sight!’—­Not you, we very well see—­but why don’t you tell us that at Rome they eat roasted chestnuts, and put the shells into their aprons, the women do, and calmly empty the whole on the heads of the passengers in the street below; and that at Padua when a man drives his waggon up to a house and stops, all the mouse-coloured oxen that pull it from a beam against their foreheads sit down in a heap and rest.  But once she travelled the country with Shelley on arm; now she plods it, Rogers in hand—­to such things and uses may we come at last!  Her remarks on art, once she lets go of Rio’s skirts, are amazing—­Fra Angelico, for instance, only painted Martyrs, Virgins &c., she had no eyes for the divine bon-bourgeoisie of his pictures; the dear common folk of his crowds, those who sit and listen (spectacle at nose and bent into a comfortable heap to hear better) at the sermon of the Saint—­and the children, and women,—­divinely pure they all are, but fresh from the streets and market place—­but she is wrong every where, that is, not right, not seeing what is to see, speaking what one expects to hear—­I quarrel with her, for ever, I think.

I am much better, and mean to be well as you desire—­shall correct the verses you have seen, and make them do for the present.

Saturday, then!  And one other time only, do you say?

God bless you, my own, best friend.

Yours ever

R.B.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Thursday.
[Post-mark, September 11, 1845.]

Will you come on Friday ... to-morrow ... instead of Saturday—­will it be the same thing?  Because I have heard from Mr. Kenyon, who is to be in London on Friday evening he says, and therefore may mean to visit me on Saturday I imagine.  So let it be Friday—­if you should not, for any reason, prove Monday to be better still.

May God bless you—­

Ever yours,

E.B.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Saturday Morning.
[Post-mark, September 13, 1845.]