16 _Bruton Street, June 23rd_.--I see the report in the 'Times' is defective. I stated that the Lord President was undoubtedly responsible for all that you did. I paid a high tribute to your services to the Judicial Committee (which was cheered by the law lords); I said the difficulty was often great to collect sufficient members to attend; that you took great pains, by ascertaining the wishes and possible dates, to ensure this; that for ordinary meetings of the Court you acted on your own judgement; but that in all cases where there was a possibility of party or personal feeling being made a cause of want of confidence in the composition of the Court, you had always consulted me; and I had, on some occasions, not only consulted the Home Office, but the Cabinet, in order to do that which would ensure public confidence. I should not be sorry if you could show that I was not in the wrong. I was delighted to hear of your C.B. None could be more deserved. The Journal records:-- _July 7th_.--I dined with Mrs. Grote; one of the first persons she saw after Grote's death. _8th_.--A banquet was given at the Crystal Palace to the members of the Comedie Francaise, who had been driven over to London by the siege of Paris and the Commune. This 'banquet' was of the nature of a lunch, beginning at two o'clock. Lord Dufferin was in the chair, supported by Lords Granville, Stanhope, Powerscourt, Lytton, Houghton, Mr. Disraeli, Tennyson, Macready, and others. When 'the desire of eating was taken away,' the chairman, speaking in French, proposed the health of the guests. M. Got responded. Horace Wigan, too, spoke; and Lord Granville, 'whose fluent command of extempore French excited general admiration,' gave 'The Health of the Chairman,' and, with a neat reference to the 'Letters from High Latitudes,' then 14, not 41 years old, said: 'L'accueil que vous avez donne a son discours doit rassurer Lord Dufferin et lui faire meme oublier les succes oratoires que--Latiniste incomparable, et voue au purisme Ciceronien--il a obtenus dans les regions plus septentrionales.' To this chaff Lord Dufferin replied in English: 'Lord Granville has been good enough to allude to what he is pleased to describe as an oratorical triumph in a distant country; and I would venture to remind you--and you may take the word of an experienced person in confirmation of what I am about to say--that when anybody wishes to make a speech in a foreign language, he will find it much more easy to do so after dinner than at an early hour in the morning.' For Reeve this wound up the season. A few days later, July 23rd, he, with his wife, started for Germany. CHAPTER XVIII THE GREVILLE MEMOIRS