bedside of suffering. I well remember how busy she was in the spring of 1865, yet with what alacrity she assisted me, weary after seven months even of the streets; of Florence, to bivouac in an unfurnished villa outside the Porta Romana, and not far from the Villa Giglione she herself then tenanted; lending or finding me linen, plate, and crockery, and pressing into the service the handsome barefooted daughters of the Podere that adjoined it, one of whom used to compute the length of time one's eggs for breakfast should be left in boiling water, by counting two hundred beats of her pulse. No sooner had she established me in this somewhat primitive mode of life, than she was summoned into the city to tend Theodosia Trollope in what proved to be the last days of her long but only too early decline; I quickly following, and taking up my abode in the Villino Trollope, in order to aid in distracting from his bereavement my valued friend, the well-known author of 'The History of the Commonwealth of Florence.' I cannot but think that it will be agreeable to Mr Browning, if I also record that she performed the same pious offices for his illustrious wife, England's, indeed the world's greatest poetess; and that she was bound to both of them by the ties of the warmest affection, admiration, and regard.
These two qualities which we have called respectively Pagan and Christian,—qualities which the unwise imagine to be conflicting, but which the understanding know to be the completion one of the other,—are reflected as fully in Isa Blagden's poems as they were
