Well, yesterday is "numbered with the years before the flood," and the company which, while in perspective, I thought would be a _gène_, turned out a resource, and gave us a great deal to talk of when spirits were flagging, and threatened to fail unless given fresh motion by some new _impingement_ from without. The ladies who were asked did not come, and the most prominent features among the gentlemen of the country who made their appearance were, Mr. Fitzallan, a man of large fortune, generally an absentee, and Mr. Ridley, another person of good estate, together with their respective sons. The politics, manners, and sentiments, in every possible department of conversation between these neighbours are north and south of each other, but as they met _here_ on neutral ground, and in a _lady's_ house, all was smooth to outward seeming. Mr. Fitzallan is a _liberal_, and very eloquent; he talked admirably on the rights of the people, the errors of Administration, the total want of honesty in Ministers; the shameful abuse of power, peculation in every quarter, prostitution of the national purse, and dereliction of justice. He sat next to Mrs. Fitzroy, whose animated countenance almost emitted _light_, as she listened to a flow of mind so congenial with her own. Mr. Ridley, on the opposite side, who took his seat next my aunt, supported even the very thickest skull to be found on the Ministerial side of Lords and Commons. To a person not immediately engaged in conversation with either of our _leaders_, nothing could be more comical than the effect of opposition in the chance-medley of sounds that vibrated round the table. It was what the printers call _a pie_, when the _devils_ have jumbled their types into confusion. I heard liberty, authority, equal rights, wholesome rule, universal suffrage, Kingly prerogatives, emancipation, Protestant ascendancy, the curse of tithes, the blessings of an Established Church, &c. in the drollest _mess_ that could be imagined. When the speakers descended from their stilts, and, quitting the arena of dispute on public affairs, _meandered_ into the paths of private life, the same remarkable difference was observable in the style of our orators. Mr. Fitzallan talked with enthusiasm of the peasantry of Ireland as the finest, but most oppressed, people under Heaven; declaring that West Indian slavery had nothing to compare, in its horrors, with the subjugation of this British island; this land of beauty, this nursery of the brave. He told some striking anecdotes of his own tenantry, who, he said, would follow him to the confines of earth, and that were he like Roderick Dhü, only to whistle as he rode along, the whole country would rise in his defence. When he spoke of his family, he dwelt on the lovely innocence of childhood, and said how hard he felt it even to _look_ angrily. All _discipline_ he left entirely to Mrs. Fitzallan, who was, he acknowledged, so much wiser