_January 13._ After I came home read the minutes of the Governor-General and Council on the college at Calcutta. There is nothing so important as to preserve young men, who are to govern an Empire, from idleness, dissipation, and debt. This must be done. The Governor-General's own superintendence may effect much. The suspension of the incompetent may do more; but while the habits of expense are given at Hayleybury, and continued by their residence without any control in the midst of a dissipated capital, nothing will reform the system. Cabinet dinner at Aberdeen's. He was an hour and a half with the King yesterday. The King was much agitated in dressing himself for the interview. The man who shaved thought he should have cut him twenty times. He had taken 100 drops of laudanum to prepare himself for the interview. Aberdeen says it is a _real_ quarrel-not a plot to get rid of us--the King thoroughly hates Prince Leopold, and he has been made to think the Ministers have slighted him in this matter. The Duke goes down to him to- morrow. He can show the King that Leopold was first mentioned by France-- that he was made acquainted with the proposal or rather suggestion made by France to Leopold on November 9, that he was then told we could not hear of it till our candidates, Prince John of Saxony and Ferdinand of Orange, were disposed of. The subject was again mentioned on November 24. In point of fact the earliest day on which it could have been made known to the King that France had distinctly proposed Leopold was Monday, and he was told on the Tuesday. The King seems to have been violently agitated. He said sneeringly to Aberdeen, '_If I may be allowed to ask, is Prince Leopold to be married to a daughter of the Duke of Orleans?_' [Footnote: This marriage took place in August 1832, when Prince Leopold had become King of the Belgians, and the Duke of Orleans King of the French.] Aberdeen said he had seen it in the newspaper and knew nothing more of it. The King alluded to the possibility of Government going out, admitted the inconvenience just before the meeting of Parliament, but said he was immovable. Leopold might go to the devil, but he should not carry English money out of the country. In the morning, talking to the Duchess of Gloucester, he said, 'If they want a Prince of my family, they might have had the Duke of Gloucester,' upon which the Duchess burst out a-laughing. The King seems thoroughly out of humour. He says 'Things seem going on very ill in India. Do not you mean to recall Lord William?' He had been made very angry in the morning by the 'Times' calling upon him to pay his brother's debts, and this morning the 'Morning Journal' places in juxtaposition the paragraphs in the 'Times,' and those for which it was lately prosecuted.