This touches her
intellectual nature, which was as incapable of being mystified or
modified by any suggestion of vanity, self-love, or gratified pride,
as the most judicial-minded judge who ever sat on the bench. Her
intellectual view on the matter _was_, I thought, mystified and
modified by the intensity of her love for the Italian cause, and of
her hatred for the evils from which she was watching the Italians
struggling to liberate themselves.
I heard, probably from herself, of whispered calumnies, such as those
she refers to in the first of the two letters given. She despised them
then, as those who loved and valued her did, though the sensitive
womanly gentleness of her nature made it a pain to her that any
fellow-creature, however ignorant and far away from her, should so
think of her. And my disgust at a secret attempt to stab has impelled
me to say what I _know_ on the subject. But I really think that not
only those who knew her as she lived In the flesh, but the tens of
thousands who know her as she lives in her written words, cannot but
feel my vindication superfluous.
The above long and specially interesting letter is written in very
small characters on ten pages of extremely small duodecimo note-paper,
as is also the other letter by the same writer given above. Mrs.
Browning's handwriting shows ever and anon an odd tendency to form
each letter of a word separately--a circumstance which I mention for
the sake of remarking that old Huntingford, the Bishop of Hereford, in
my young days, between whom and Mrs.
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