“Villa Morelli, June 28, 1866.
“I begin this at midnight, the first cool moment of the twenty-four hours, to finish to-morrow some time before post hour. I see that you have learned our disaster here already—a sore blow, too, to a young army: but que voulez-vous? La Marmora is an ass, with a small head and a large face like Packington. You might make a first lord of him, but never a general. The attack of the first division had never been intended to do more than draw out the Austrians and encourage the belief that the grand attack was to follow: meanwhile Cialdini was to have crossed the Po and moved on Rovigo. The blundering generals made a real movement of it, and got a real thrashing for their pains. The division was all but cut to pieces. They fought well—there’s no doubt of it; they even bore beating, which is more than one would have said of them. The king was twice surrounded and all but made prisoner, and the princes behaved splendidly.
“It is a great misfortune that they should have met a repulse at first. I say this because they must have Venice, and I think the great thing is that they should have it without French intervention. I hope if the Conservatives come in that they will see this, and see that Italy cannot go back without being a French province. If we have a policy at all,—sometimes I doubt it,—it is to prevent or delay French aggrandisement. That stupid bosh of volunteer soldiering has so bemuddled English brains that they fancy we have an army. Why, a costermonger with his donkey might as well talk of his ‘steed.’ I wouldn’t say this to a foreigner, nor let them say it to me, but it’s true. If we could patch up the Italian quarrel and get Venice for them, and arrange an alliance between Italy and Austria, we should do more than by following the lead of Louis Napoleon and playing ‘cad’ to him through Europe.
“Are the Derbys really coming in? Who will be F. Secretary? I was going to say, ‘Who wants me?’
“I was thinking of keeping a running comment on the war in ‘O’Dowd,’ the events jotted as they occurred, with such remarks as suggested themselves—a hotch-potch of war, morals, politics, &c. What think you? Of course, with a certain seriousness; it is no joking matter, in any view one takes of it.
“What a wonderful book ‘Felix Holt’ is! I read much of it twice over, some of it three times, and throughout there is a restrained power—a latent heat—far greater than anything developed. She at least suggests to me that her dernier mot is not there on anything. It is not a pleasant book as to the effect on the mind when finished; but you cannot forget it, and you cannot take up another after it. It is years since anything I read has taken the same hold upon me.
“Here has just come news that General Chiera has been shot by court-martial for treason, having betrayed the Italian plans to the Austrians. What next? The Neapolitans have earned a dark fame for themselves in all their late history. I don’t know yet if the story is authentic.
“I have little confidence in the Tories’ hold of office, and I have less still that they will do anything for me, though there is scarcely a man of the Party who has not given me pledges or assurances of remembrance.
“Malmesbury will, I hear, go to Ireland, and he will do there. There is not a people in the world who can vie with the Irish in their indifference to real benefits, and their intense delight in mock ones! When will you Saxons learn how to govern Ireland? When you want a treaty with King Hoolamaldla in Africa, you approach him not with a tariff and a code of reduced duties, but with strings of beads, bell-wire, and brass buttons, and why won’t you see that Ireland can be had by something cheaper than Acts of Parliament!
“And my old friend Whiteside is to [be] Chief-Justice if Baron Lendrick (I mean Lefroy) will consent to retire! It is a grand comment on our judicial system, that when a man is too old for public life he is always young enough for the Bench.