One thing is ignored in the book. Under all the ridiculousness, under all the wickedness even of such men and women, lies _a cause_, a right inherent, a wrong committed. The cant presupposes a doctrine, and the pretension a real heroism. Your best people (in your book) seem to have no notion of this. Your heroine deserves to be a victim, not because she was rash and ignorant, but because she was selfish and foolish. The world wasn't lost for her because she loved--either a cause or a man--but because she wanted change and excitement. If she had felt on the abstract question as I have known women to feel, even when they have acted like fools, I should pity her more. As it is, the lesson was necessary. If she had not married rashly an Italian _birbante_ she would have married rashly an English blackguard, and I myself see small difference in the kinds. With _you_, however, to your mind, it is different; and in this view of yours seems to me to lie the main fault of your book. You evidently think that God made only the English. The English are a peculiar people. Their worst is better than the best of the exterior nations. Over the rest of the world He has cast out His shoe. Even supposing that a foreigner does, by extraordinary exception, some good thing, it's only in reaction from having murdered somebody last year, or at least left his children to starve the year before. Truth, generosity, nobleness of will and mind, these things do not exist beyond the influence of the 'Times' newspaper and the 'Saturday Review.' (By the way, it would be extraordinary if it _were so_.') Well, I have lived thirteen years on the Continent, and, far as England is from Italy, far as the heavens are from the earth, I dissent from you, dissent from you, dissent from you. I say so, and there is an end. It is relief to me, and will make no impression on you; but for my sake you permit me to say it, I feel sure. Dear Mr. Chorley, Robert and I have had true pleasure (in spite of all this fault-finding) in feeling ourselves close to you in your book. Volume after volume we have exchanged, talking of you, praising you here, blaming you there, but always feeling pleasure in reading your words and speaking your name. Don't say it's the last novel. You, who can do so much. Write us another at once rather, doing justice to our sublime Azeglios and acute Cavours and energetic Farinis. If I could hear an English statesman (Conservative or Liberal) speak out of a large heart and generous comprehension as I did Azeglio this last spring, I should thank God for it. I fear I never shall. My boy may, perhaps. Red tape has garrotted this political generation.... I persist in being in high hopes for my Italy. Ever affectionately yours ELIZABETH B. BROWNING. * * * * *