What Lord Malmesbury had said amounted to this--that in 1844, when the Russian Emperor Nicholas was in London, 'he, Sir Robert Peel (then prime minister) and Lord Aberdeen (then foreign secretary) drew up and _signed_ a memorandum' to the effect that England 'would support Russia in her legitimate protectorship of the Greek religion and the Holy Shrines, without consulting France. Lord Malmesbury added that the fact of Lord Aberdeen, one of the signers of this paper, being prime minister in 1853, was taken by Nicholas as a ground for believing that England would not join France to restrain the pretensions of Russia, and therefore, by implication, that Lord Aberdeen's being prime minister was a--if not the--principal cause of the war. [Footnote: _Lord Malmesbury's Memoirs of an Ex-Minister_ (1st edit.), i. 402-3.] The memorandum itself, as printed in the Blue Book, differs essentially, both in matter and form, from Lord Malmesbury's description of it. It is entitled 'Memorandum by Count Nesselrode delivered to Her Majesty's Government and founded on communications received from the Emperor of Russia subsequently to His Imperial Majesty's visit to England in June 1844.' [Footnote: _Parliamentary Papers_, 1854, lxxi. 863.] It is unsigned, and from the nature of it must be so; it is in no sense an agreement, but a proposal that England should agree to act in concert with Russia and Austria; and nothing whatever is said about the Greek religion, the Holy Places, or the Russian protectorate. It is of course possible that conversations between Nicholas and Lord Aberdeen, which preceded the drawing up of this memorandum, may have encouraged the one and hampered the other; but of this there is no evidence, and Lord Malmesbury could not possibly know anything about it, though he did know something--very inaccurately it appears--about the memorandum. The discrepancies had, in fact, led Reeve to suppose that Malmesbury's statement must refer to another memorandum; and thus Lord Stanmore's letter has a singular historical interest, bearing, as it does, on a point that has been much discussed. _From Sir Arthur Gordon_