SD2462. Isa Blagden to Margherita Albana-Mignaty

Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 291 (in part).

[Florence]

[ca. 5 July 1861]

My dear Maga,

I was so sorry to hear you were so ill. I trust this will find you better. Any evening next week Mr Mignaty likes to come up here to see Mr Browning he will be glad I am sure & it is perhaps better here than at Casa Guidi—more leisure & less excitement. Tell Mr Mignaty I never can forget that his arm helped me away from that grave; otherwise I should not have been able to crawl– It is a tie between us forever—so considerate & kind at such a time!!! Will you when you are better write to The Duchess and ask her if she will ask d’Azeglio—to petition the King to allow a tablet to be placed to the greatest poetess of any age (& the most devoted lover of Italy among English authors) on the walls of Ste Croce. She was a Protestant but Genius is Catholic—& if ever anyone helped a cause with brain, heart, purse—I may say life for the excitement of these years had been very bad for her it was the dear one who is gone. If a good list of Italian names could be got together Sir J Hudson would not mind asking & they would not like refusing him anything.

Ever yours affly

Isa

The idea of this tablet is wholly mine– Mr Browning would not stir an inch for such a thing—& I asked Mr Trollope before I named it to him.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.

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