... Dearest friend, it is true that I have seldom been so upset as by
this act of poor dear Miss Mitford's, and the very impossibility of
being vindictive on this occasion increased my agitation at the
moment....

There are defects in delicacy and apprehensiveness, one cannot deny it,
and yet I assure you that a more generous and fervent woman never lived
than dear Miss Mitford is, and if you knew her you would do her this
justice. She is better in herself than in her books--more large, more
energetic, more human altogether. I think I understand her better on the
whole than she understands me (which is not saying much), and I admire
her on various accounts. She talks better, for instance, than most
writers, male or female, whom I have had any intercourse with. And
affectionate in the extreme, she has always been to me.

So I have mystified you and disgusted you with my politics, and my
friends in England have put me in the corner; just so....

The French nation is very peculiar. We choose to boast ourselves of
being different in England, but we have simply _les qualités de nos
défauts_ after all. The clash of speculative opinions is dreadful here,
practical men catch at the ideal as if it were a loaf of bread, and they
literally set about cutting out their Romeos 'into little stars,' as if
that were the most natural thing in the world. As for the socialists, I
quite agree with you that various of them, yes, and some of their chief
men, are full of pure and noble aspiration, the most virtuous of men and
the most benevolent. Still, they hold in their hands, in their clean
hands, ideas that kill, ideas which defile, ideas which, if carried out,
would be the worst and most crushing kind of despotism. I would rather
live under the feet of the Czar than in those states of perfectibility