I must admit, at all hazards, that my friends here consider me exceptionally averse to politics; and I suppose I must be, for I never read a parliamentary debate in my life! At the same time I will add that, among those whose opinions I most value, some think me not altogether wrong when I venture to speak of the momentary momentousness and eternal futility of many noisiest questions. However, you must simply view me as a nonentity in any practical relation to such matters. You have spoken but too generously of a sonnet of mine in your lecture just received. I have written a few others of the sort (which by-the-bye would not prove me a Tory), but felt no vocation--perhaps no right---to print them. I have always reproached myself as sorely amenable to the condemnations of a very fine poem by Barberino, _On Sloth against Sin_, which I translated in the Dante volume. Sloth, alas! has but too much to answer for with me; and is one of the reasons (though I will not say the only one), why I have always fallen back on quality instead of quantity in the little I have ever done. I think often with Coleridge: Sloth jaundiced all: and from my graspless hand Drop friendship’s precious pearls like hour-glass sand. I weep, yet stoop not: the faint anguish flows, A dreamy pang in morning’s feverish doze. However, for all I might desire in the direction spoken of, volition is vain without vocation; and I had better really stick to knowing how to mix vermilion and ultramarine for a flesh-grey, and how to manage their equivalents in verse. To speak without sparing myself,--my mind is a childish one, if to be isolated in Art is child’s-play; at any rate I feel that I do not attain to the more active and practical of the mental functions of manhood. I can say this to you, because I know you will make the best and not the worst of me; and better than such feasible best I do not wish to appear. Thus you see I don’t think my name ought to head your introductory paragraph--and there an end. And now of your new lecture, and of the long letter I lately had from you. At some moment I should like to know which pieces among the translations are specially your favourites. Of the three names you leash together as somewhat those of sensualists, Cecco Angiolieri is really the only one--as for the respectable Cino, he would be shocked indeed, though certainly there are a few oddities bearing that way in the sonnets between him and Dante (who is again similarly reproached by his friend Cavalcanti), but I really _do_ suspect that in some cases similar to the one in question about Cino (though not Guido and Dante) politics were really meant where love was used as a metaphor.... I assure you,