But I should not talk politics to a politician. Nothing, I think you will agree, can reconcile conceptions bred in the House of Commons with those begot outside it. It has never yet been accomplished, and I gather, from the few English journals I see, that the attempt to do so is all but abandoned. I am writing to you to-day because I wished to do so in Verona, but was there too deep in an emotional flux to be able to write anything but bad poetry or a crude expression of sympathy, which, as it would have been gratuitous, must have been offensive. To-day, in Livorno (which our sailors have chewed with their tobacco into Leghorn), I found among my papers a letter written to you by Matilda nearly twelve years ago. It belongs to you and I send it. Yesterday in Livorno I found a marionette show and that set me thinking of England and the theater and many other subjects which used to absorb me during the hectic years of my life when I dwelt in Gray's Inn. And I wished to communicate with England and could find no one to whom I am so nearly attached as you. I was engaged to visit Elba, and was there this morning, but was so distressed with the thought of the extreme youthfulness of England's treatment of the great Napoleon that I left my party and crossed over to Capraia, which you will find on the map, and here, under the hot sun, with a green umbrella over my bald head, I am writing. I can see Elba. With my mind's eye I can see England, and, indeed, when soberly I turn the matter over, I conclude that her treatment of Napoleon has not been nearly so shameful as her treatment of Shelley or Shakespeare. Shelley wrote one play; it has never openly been acted. Shakespeare wrote many plays; they have been Butchered, reduced from the dramatic to the theatrical. The marionettes stirred me greatly. The drama they played was familiar--husband, wife, and lover--the treatment conventional, though the dialogue had the freshness of improvisation. It was often bald as my head, and in the more passionate moments almost heartbreakingly inarticulate. It was a tragedy; the husband slew the lover, the wife stabbed herself, the husband went mad, and they lay together in a limp heap, while from the street outside--where, I felt sure, there were gay puppets carelessly strolling--came the most comic, derisive little tune played upon a reed. (It must have been a reed, for it was most certainly puppet and no human music, and, for that, only the more stirring.) The whole scene is as living to my mind as any experience of my own, and, indeed, my own adventures in this life have been illuminated by it. In the English theater I have never seen a performance that did not thicken and obscure my consciousness. I could not but contrast the two, and you find me sitting on an island striving to explain it.