sants to get rid of these despoilers,
that as he first listened to the uproar of the firing and the echoes he
half fancied it a siege of Albaro. The flies mustered strong, too, and
the mosquitos;[85] so that at night he had to lie covered up with gauze,
like cold meat in a safe.

Of course all news from England, and especially visits paid him by
English friends who might be travelling in Italy, were a great delight.
This was the year when O'Connell was released from prison by the
judgment of the Lords on appeal. "I have no faith in O'Connell taking
the great position he might upon this: being beleaguered by vanity
always. Denman delights me. I am glad to think I have always liked him
so well. I am sure that whenever he makes a mistake, it _is_ a mistake;
and that no man lives who has a grander and nobler scorn of every mean
and dastard action. I would to Heaven it were decorous to pay him some
public tribute of respect . . . O'Connell's speeches are the old thing:
fretty, boastful, frothy, waspish at the voices in the crowd, and all
that: but with no true greatness. . . . What a relief to turn to that noble
letter of Carlyle's" (in which a timely testimony had been borne to the
truthfulness and honour of Mazzini), "which I think above all praise. My
love to him." Among his English visitors were Mr. Tagart's family, on
their way from a scientific congress at Milan; and Peter (now become
Lord) Robertson from Rome, of whose talk he wrote very pleasantly. The
sons of Burns had been entertained during the summer in Edinburgh at
what was called a Burns Festival, of which, through Jerrold who was
present, I had sent him no very favourable account; and this was now
confirmed by Robertson, whose letters had given him an "awful" narrative
of Wilson's speech, and of the whole business. "There was one man who
spoke a quarter of an hour or so, to the toast of the navy; and could
say nothing more than 'the--British--navy--always appreciates--' which
remarkable sentiment he repeated over and over again for that space of
time; and then sat down. Robertson told me also that Wilson's allusion
to, or I should rather say expatiation upon, the 'vices' of Burns,
excited but one sentiment of indignation and disgust: and added, very
sensibly, 'By God!--I want to know _what Burns did_! I never heard of
his doing anything that need be strange or unaccountable to the
Professor's mind. I think he must have mistaken the name, and fancied it
a dinne