"Layard was with us for a couple of days a little while ago, and brought the last report of you, and of your daughter, who seems to have made a great impression on him. I wish he had had the keepership of the National Gallery, for I don't think his Government will hold together through many weeks.
"I wonder whether you thought as highly of Gibson's art as the lady did who wrote the verses. I must say that I did not, and that I thought it of a mechanical sort, with no great amount of imagination in it. It seemed to me as if he 'didn't find me' in that, as the servants say, but only provided me with carved marble, and expected me to furnish myself with as much idea as I could afford.
"Very faithfully yours,
"CHARLES DICKENS."
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I do not remember the verses, though I feel confident that the lady who sent them through me must have been a very charming person. As to Gibson, no criticism could be sounder. I had a considerable liking for Gibson as a man, and admiration for his character, but as regards his ideal productions I think Dickens hits the right nail on the head.
In another letter of the same year, 25th July, after a page of remarks on editorial matters, he writes:—
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"If Italy could but achieve some brilliant success in arms! That she does not, causes, I think, some disappointment here, and makes her sluggish friends more sluggish, and her open enemies more powerful. I fear too that the Italian ministry have lost an excellent opportunity of repairing the national credit in London city, and have borrowed money in France for the poor consideration of lower interest, which" [sic, but I suspect which must be a slip of the pen for than] "they could have got in England, greatly to the re-establishment of a reputation for public good faith. As to Louis Napoleon, his position in the whole matter is to me like his position in Europe at all times, simply disheartening and astounding. Between Prussia and Austria there is, in my mind (but for Italy), not a pin to choose. If each could smash the other I should be, as to those two Powers, perfectly satisfied. But I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born. So here you have in brief my confession of faith.
"Mr. Home" [as he by that time called himself,—when he was staying in my house his name was Hume], "after trying to come out as an actor, first at Fechter's (where I had the honour of stopping him short), and then at the St. James's Theatre under Miss Herbert (where he was twice announced, and each time very mysteriously disappeared from the bills), was announced at the little theatre in Dean Street, Soho, as a 'great attraction for one night only,' to play last Monday. An appropriately dirty little rag of a bill, fluttering in the window of an obscure dairy behind the Strand, gave me this intelligence last Saturday. It is like enough that even that striking business did not come off, for I believe the public to have found out the scoundrel; in which lively and sustaining hope this leaves me at present.