only at a distance.

The great convulsion of '48 flung wide the gates of Italy to the
wanderer, and I returned to Turin. I had left it at freezing-point,
and I found it at white-heat. Half Europe revolutionized,--France a
republic, Vienna in a blaze, Hungary in arms, Radetzky driven out of
Milan, a Piedmontese army in Lombardy,--there was more than enough to
turn the heads of the Seven Sages of Greece. No wonder ours were turned.
Serve a splendid banquet and pour out generous wine to a shipwrecked
crew who have long been starving, and ten to one they will overfeed
themselves and get drunk and quarrel. We did both, alas!--and those who
are drunk and quarrel are likely to be overpowered by those who keep
sober and united. We were divided about the sauce with which the hare
should be dressed, and, in the heat of argument, lost sight of this
little fact, that a hare, to be dressed at all, must first be caught.
The first reverses overtook us thus occupied. They did not sober us;
quite the contrary; we fell to doing what Manzoni's capons did.

By-the-by, since that revered name comes under my pen, I may as well
state, what every one will be glad to hear, that the author of the
"Promessi Sposi" has perfectly recovered from his late illness. It
cannot be but that the wail of a nation has reached even across the
Atlantic, without the aid of an electric cable. He looks strong and
healthy, and likely to be long spared to the love and veneration of his
country. I have this on the authority of a witness _de visu et auditu_,
a friend of his and mine, who visited the great man, not a fortnight
ago, in his retreat of Brusuglio, near Milan.

To leave the author for his book. Do you recollect Renzo tying four fat
capons by the legs, and carrying them, with their heads hanging down, to