“You will see how my first part of O’D. predicted the cession of Venice. I am rather proud of my foresight.
“There is great dissatisfaction here felt about the inaction of the Italian fleet. Some allege they want coals, some say courage. I don’t believe either: I think they were sent off so undisciplined and so hastily ‘conscripted,’ they are mobs and not crews.
“P. S.—I only wanted to say, not to be afraid of my anti-Napism. I am sure I have the right measure of the man, and I am sure that when Lord Palmerston called him ‘a d———d scoundrel,’ he said what Lord Derby thinks, and what almost every man of the same station in England feels about him. When the day comes that he will turn upon us, there will be no surprise felt whatever by the great number of statesmen in England.
“What of my Yankee paper? It was so well-timed, I’m sorry it should be lost.
“What a fiasco the Garibaldians have made of it! They are drunk all day, and it is next to impossible to get them under fire. Poor old Garibaldi is half heartbroken at the inglorious ending of his great career, and no fault of his. For the nation at large it is perhaps the best thing that could happen. Democracy cannot now go on asserting its monopoly of courage.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Villa Morelli, Florence, July 18, 1866.
“Our post is so very irregular now that your letter—13th—which should have been with me yesterday, only reached to-day.
“I don’t think I am wrong as to Louis Nap. The immense preponderance in Europe that will accrue to Prussia after this war will be heavily felt by him,—for, after all, he has no other hold on Frenchmen than the supremacy he has obtained for France on the Continent.
“I am ashamed to find Lord Stanley falling into the Whig cant about our ‘faithful ally,’ &c. Why, the whole world knows that he first traded on the English alliance, and, once assured of her own safety, has spared no means to depreciate English power and disparage her influence in Europe.