For language she had an especial talent, was dainty in the use of her own, and astonishingly apt in acquiring--not merely the use for speaking as well as reading purposes, but--the delicacies of other tongues. Of Italian, with which she was naturally _most_ conversant, she was recognised by acknowledged experts to be a thoroughly competent critic. She published, now many years ago, in the _Athenaeum_, some translations from the satirist Giusti, which any intelligent reader would, I think, recognise to be cleverly done. But none save the very few in this country, who know and can understand the Tuscan poet's works in the original, can at all conceive the difficulty of translating him into tolerable English verse. And I have no hesitation in asserting, that any competent judge, who is such by virtue of understanding the original, would pronounce her translations of Giusti to be a masterpiece, which very few indeed of contemporary men or women could have produced. I have more than once surprised her in tears occasioned by her obstinate struggles with some passage of the intensely idiomatic satirist, which she found it almost--but eventually not quite--impossible to render to her satisfaction. She published a translation of Niccolini's _Arnaldo da Brescia_, which won the cordial admiration and friendship of that great poet. And neither Niccolini's admiration nor his friendship were easily won. He was, when we knew him at Florence in his old age, a somewhat crabbed old man, not at all disposed to make new acquaintances, and, I think, somewhat soured and disappointed, not certainly with the meed of admiration he had won from his countrymen as a poet, but with the amount of effect which his writings had availed to produce in the political sentiments and then apparent destinies of the Italians. But he was conquered by the young Englishwoman's translation of his favourite, and, I think, his finest work. It is a thoroughly trustworthy and excellent translation; but the execution of it was child's play in comparison with the translations from Giusti.