My dearest Mrs. Martin,--I am in consternation and vexation on receiving
your letter. What you must have thought of me all this time! Of course I
never saw the letters which went to Rome. Letters sent to Poste
restante, Rome, are generally lost, even if you are a Roman: and we are
no Romans, alas! nor likely to become such, it seems to me. There's a
fatality about Rome to us. I waited for you to write, and then waited on
foolishly for the settlement of our own plans, after I had ascertained
that you were not in Devonshire, but in France as usual. Now, I can't
help writing, though I have written a letter already which must have
crossed yours--a long letter--so that you will have more than enough of
me this time.

It's comfort and pleasure after all to have a good account of you both,
my very dear friends, even though one knows by it that you have been
sending one 'al diavolo' for weeks or months. Forgive me, do. I feel
guilty somehow to the extreme degree, that four letters should have been
written to me, even though I received none of them, because I ought to
have written at least one letter in that time.

Your politics would be my politics on most points; we should run
together more than halfway, if we could stand side by side, in spite of
all your vindictiveness to N. III. My hero--say you? Well, I have more
belief in him than you have. And what is curious, and would be
unaccountable, I suppose, to English politicians in general, the Italian
democrats of the lower classes, the popular clubs in Florence, are
clinging to him as their one hope. Ah, here's oppression! here's a
people trodden down! You should come here and see. It is enough to turn
the depths of the heart bitter. The will of the people forced, their
instinctive affections despised, their liberty of thought spied into,
their national life ignored altogether. Robert keeps saying, 'How long,