I have had the honour to receive, a few days ago, your Lordship’s letter of the fifth inst., than which no letter could have given me greater pleasure. I should have acknowledged this honour ere this, had not the malady and subsequent death of Lord Langdale, one of the best friends I have ever had, taken from me the power of fulfilling even the most agreeable duty of thanking your Lordship for the kindness in remembering my request in reference to Alberoni, and still more for that of addressing to me so excellent a letter as you have been pleased to do. I cannot give your Lordship better proof of the value I set on your communication than by respectfully and frankly laying before your Lordship my views on the various topics to which your letter draws my attention, even when those views do not unfortunately coincide with your Lordship’s. Before coming to that, however, I wish to say a few words respecting Alberoni. From Prince Castelcicala I had already received a message, for which I begged him to thank your Lordship, showing that you had not forgotten the favour I had been encouraged by your kindness to ask your Lordship. I now beg to enclose a memorandum in Italian, stating in a few words what I want from Rome, and why I want it, and if a further attempt could be made I should feel obliged; if not, we must have patience. The Emperor of Russia has actually graciously condescended to order the copies of certain documents in his Imperial Archives to be made out and sent to me, and at Rome one cannot, even through the powerful interest of your Lordship, find means of knowing whether certain papers contain any charge against a Cardinal, who was certainly innocent, who is calumniated in history, and whose innocence, it is expected, would be fully established were the contents of the papers in question known. These are mortifying comparisons, my Lord, for us both as Catholics, and for me, moreover, as an Italian. The schismatic Emperor more ready to assist in proving the innocence of a Cardinal than Rome!!! Whatever has been printed and published respecting Alberoni I have procured, and the letters mentioned by your Lordship were the documents which led me first to suppose him innocent and calumniated, a supposition which further researches have amply confirmed. I sincerely wish Cardinal Wiseman had remained at Rome, not so much on account of the assistance which, I do not doubt, his Eminence would have lent me in the Alberoni affair, as, on account of the irreparable mischief that his coming back to England has produced....” The reader need hardly to be reminded that the last sentence refers to the celebrated “Papal aggression” of 1851. Panizzi’s answer to Lord Shrewsbury’s curious laudation of the Government of Naples is direct and incisive:—