All that she prayed was to press no questions, force no issues.

But at least she had found in it a new reason for living; she meant to live; whereas last year she had wished to die, and all the world--dear, kind Aunt Pattie first and foremost--had thought her on the road for death.
But the book ?--she bent her brows over it, wrestling with various doubts and difficulties.

Though it was supposed to represent the thoughts and fancies of an Englishman wandering through modern Italy, it was really Manisty's Apologia--Manisty's defence of certain acts which had made him for a time the scandal and offence of the English political party to which ancestrally he belonged, in whose interests he had entered Parliament and taken office.

He had broken with his party on the ground that it had become a party of revolution, especially in matters connected with Religion and Education; and having come abroad to escape for a time from the personal frictions and agitations which his conduct had brought upon him, he had thrown himself into a passionate and most hostile study of Italy--Italy, the new country, made by revolution, fashioned, so far as laws and government can do it, by the lay modern spirit--as an object-lesson to England and the world.

The book was in reality a party pamphlet, written by a man whose history and antecedents, independently of his literary ability, made his work certain of readers and of vogue.
That, however, was not what Mrs.Burgoyne was thinking of .-- She was anxiously debating with herself certain points of detail, points of form.
These fragments of poetical prose which Manisty had interspersed amid a serious political argument--were they really an adornment of the book, or a blur upon it?
He had a natural tendency towards colour and exuberance in writing; he loved to be leisurely, and a little sonorous; there was something old-fashioned and Byronic in his style and taste.