e saw Louis Napoleon enter Paris in immediate face of the
empire, and that once in Florence. I like the 'manly soul' in her face
and manners. Manly, not masculine--an excellent distinction of Mrs.
Jameson's. By the way, we hear wonderful things of the portrait painted
of Miss Cushman at Rome by Mr. Page the artist, called 'the American
Titian' by the Americans....

There I stop, not to 'fret' you beyond measure. Besides, now that you
Czars of the 'Athenaeum' have set your Faradays on us, ukase and knout,
what Pole, in the deepest of the brain, would dare to have a thought on
the subject? Now that Professor Faraday has 'condescended,' as the
'Literary Gazette' affectingly puts it (and the condescension is
sufficiently obvious in the letter--'how we stoop!')--now that Professor
Faraday has condescended to explain the whole question--which had
offered some difficulty, it is admitted, to 'hundreds of intelligent
men, including five or six eminent men of science,' in Paris, and, we
may add, to thousands of unintelligent men elsewhere, including the
eminent correspondent of the 'Literary Gazette'--let us all be silent
for evermore. For my part, I won't say that Lord Bacon would have
explained any question to a child even without feeling it to be an act
of condescension. I won't hint under my breath that Lord Bacon
reverenced every _fact_ as a footstep of Deity, and stooped to pick up
every rough, ungainly stone of a fact, though it were likely to tear and
deform the smooth wallet of a theory. I, for my part, belong, you know,
not to the 'eminent men of science,' nor even to the 'intelligent men,'
but simply to the women, children (and poets?), and if we happen to see
with our eyes a table lifted from the floor without the touch of a
finger or foot, let no dog of us bark--much less a puppy-dog! The famous
letter holds us gagged. What it does not hold is the facts; but, _en
revanche_, the writer and his abettors know the secret of being
invincible--which is, not to fight. My child proposed a donkey-race
yesterday, the condition being that he should ride first. Somebody, told
me once that when Miss Martineau has spoken eloquently on one side of a
question, she drops her ear-trumpet to give the opportunity to her
adversary. Most controversies, to do justice to the world, are conducted
on the same plan and terms.

What I do venture however to say is that it's _not_ all over in Paris
because of Faraday's letter. _Ask Lamartine._ W