Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta,: written by her friends. With selections from her correspondence and from her writings in prose and poetry.

Rnne C. X.:Lotta
a radiant vision on the eyes of the Old World; and lastly, its
present government and the glorious revolution that established it.
7th. Just read the " Court and Camp of Bonaparte," and I half
regret it, for the writer with his faint praise has succeeded in
belittling Napoleon, in my eyes at least, much more effectually
than Scott, whose prejudice is so apparent that one sees at once
that for him nothing good could come out of France. This other
writer, instead of dazzling us with glimpses of Napoleon's cometlike career, gives us petty details that destroy the whole effect.
The reading of it is like going behind the curtains at one of those
dioramas, which are very beautiful if seen in the proper distance
and light.
"Of all that flattered, followed, sought, and sued," how few
adhered to the Emperor in his fall! What a bitter disappointment to a young and generous nature to find that the world is
indeed made of such materials! I used to have a sort of poetic
creed that it was selfish, cold, and ungrateful, but at the same
time there was a latent hope that it might be poetry after all.
It remained for experience, corroborated by history, to demonstrate its sad reality.
8th. To-day I read a book of travels, a poor thing enough,
but interesting to me, as it describes
The scenes my earliest dreams have dwelt upon.
Can it be that my presentiments will never be realized, and that
* I shall die without seeing those lands, when I have envied even
the waves that kiss their sunny shores?
The author seems to belong to that class of persons who are
neither poets nor men of common sense. Poets often lack
common sense, or rather see everything through a poetic
haze, and nothing with vulgar eyes. For instance, Lamartine,
in his "Pilgrimage to the Holy Land," while our own country man was disputing with his guide about the bakshish, belaboring
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