I am very thankful for your kind, interesting, though melancholy letter of the 24th ult., but which only reached me yesterday evening, and as our post goes tomorrow, I have but little time to say anything. But the main question you have treated is so important and big with all sorts of consequences, that I cannot refrain from immediately touching on it. I translated that portion relating to Naples, and took it to the Lord Lieutenant, who will forthwith send it to Naples, and ask for some official document in return. He at once, as I was sure he could with a safe conscience, denied the truth of the main charges. That the prisons are in a very unsatisfactory state, cannot be denied, and is sadly to be lamented. But reforms are almost always tedious and difficult. In what condition were the prisons in England some fifty years ago? Yet the King is by no means unmindful of them, and the female prisons have been thoroughly amended. They are now in the hands of the Jesuits and the Sisters of Charity.... But the iniquities of the Judicial system, as applied to State prisoners, is the great offence. Now, from what I had heard from Sir William Temple myself and from others, and what I hear now from the good Prince who rules this island, I am thoroughly convinced that Mr. Gladstone has been deceived by false testimony. The King’s government is the least vindictive it is possible to conceive; before 1848 there was not one State prisoner in Naples, and before the Revolution here, there had not been one single capital execution for six years. So much the worse you will say, and so say I. It was this mistaken leniency that wrought out half of the social mischief. Remember the trials are all public, the witnesses are examined in public, the proceedings are published in the public papers, and out of the thousands who have offended, very few are arrested and tried. The proceedings are slow for the purpose of giving, not violating justice, ... Sir W. Temple told me all that you have now asserted on the authority of Mr. Gladstone and Sir W. Molesworth, and he added that of all the liberal side of the late Chamber of Deputies there was not one who was not either an exile or a prisoner. I was horrified at the statement, and went forthwith to a most respectable English _Resident_, who knew Naples well: he immediately said, ‘That is false, to my own knowledge, for I am acquainted with several who are neither one nor the other.’ But the truth is that Sir W. Temple is mystified, and thus mystified others. He and Lord Napier, and all the Consuls, and all the travelling Ministers (such as Lord Minto) are, and have been ever in the hands of the Revolutionary Party, and are duped by them, and I am confident that Mr. Gladstone’s evidence will turn out of the same quality. After all, who were the liberals’ deputies?—who