We have had Brougham every day at the Council Office, more busy writing a review of Lady Charlotte Bury's book than with the matter before the Judicial Committee. He writes this with inconceivable rapidity, seldom corrects, and never reads over what he has written, but packs it up and despatches it rough from his pen to Macvey Napier. He is in exuberant spirits and full of talk, and certainly marvellously agreeable. His talk (for conversation is not the word for it) is totally unlike that of anybody else I ever heard. It comes forth without the slightest effort, provided he is in spirits and disposed to talk at all. It is the spontaneous outpouring of one of the most fertile and restless of minds, easy, familiar, abundant, and discursive. The qualities and peculiarities of mind which mar his oratorical, give zest and effect to his conversational, powers; for the perpetual bubbling up of fresh ideas, by incapacitating him from condensing his speeches, often makes them tediously digressive and long; but in society he treads the ground with so elastic a step, he touches everything so lightly and so adorns all that he touches, his turns and his breaks are so various, unexpected, and pungent, that he not only interests and amuses, but always exhilarates his audience so as to render weariness and satiety impossible. He is now coquetting a little with the Tories, and especially professes great deference and profound respect for the Duke of Wellington; his sole object in politics, for the moment, is to badger, twit, and torment the Ministry, and in this he cannot contain himself within the bounds of common civility, as he exemplified the other night when he talked of 'Lord John this and Mr. Spring that' (on Thursday night), which, however contemptuous, was too undignified to be effective. He calls this 'the Thomson Government' from its _least_ considerable member. February 25th, 1838 {p.066} [Page Head: O'CONNELL AT THE CROWN AND ANCHOR.]