at a loss for a long time.
Similarly, your characters have really surprised me. From the lawyer to
the Princess, I swear to them as true; and in your fathoming of Rosamond
altogether, there is a profound wise knowledge that I admire and respect
with a heartiness not easily overstated in words.

I am not quite with you as to the Italians. Your knowledge of the
Italian character seems to me surprisingly subtle and penetrating;
but I think we owe it to those most unhappy men and their political
wretchedness to ask ourselves mercifully, whether their faults
are not essentially the faults of a people long oppressed and
priest-ridden;--whether their tendency to slink and conspire is not a
tendency that spies in every dress, from the triple crown to a lousy
head, have engendered in their ancestors through generations? Again,
like you, I shudder at the distresses that come of these unavailing
risings; my blood runs hotter, as yours does, at the thought of the
leaders safe, and the instruments perishing by hundreds; yet what is to
be done? Their wrongs are so great that they _will_ rise from time to
time somehow. It would be to doubt the eternal providence of God to
doubt that they will rise successfully at last. Unavailing struggles
against a dominant tyranny precede all successful turning against it.
And is it not a little hard in us Englishman, whose forefathers have
risen so often and striven against so much, to look on, in our own
security, through microscopes, and detect the motes in the brains of men
driven mad? Think, if you and I were Italians, and had grown from
boyhood to our present time, menaced in every day through all these
years by that infernal confessional, dungeons, and soldiers, could we be
better than these men? Should we be so good? I should not, I am afraid,
if I know myself. Such things would make of me a moody, bloodthirsty,
implacable man, who would do anything for revenge; and if I compromised
the truth--put it at the worst, habitually--where should I ever have had
it before me? In the old Jesuits' college at Genoa, on the Chiaja at
Naples, in the churches of Rome, at the University of Padua, on the
Piazzo San Marco at Venice, where? And the government is in all these
places, and in all Italian places. I have seen something of these men. I
have known Mazzini and Gallenga; Manin was tutor to my daughters in
Paris; I have had long talks about scores of them with poor Ary
Scheffer, who was their best frie