_April 6th._--Everybody is talking of the great stir that is making in the country against the Maynooth grant and the large increase to Peel's unpopularity which it has produced. Some even fancy that he will have difficulty in carrying the measure through, but I incline to think the difficulty indoors and the excitement without are both overrated, and certainly will not be enough to arrest the progress of the measure; but that it disgusts the Tory party and creates fresh sources of dislike and disunion between the great body of the Conservatives and the Government is indubitable, and Peel and his colleagues are so well aware of this, that they think something must, before long, occur to break up the Government. Wharncliffe told me Peel was quite sensible of this danger, and that he himself had for above a year been likewise sensible of it, and he showed me a paper which he drew up last year on the situation and prospects of the Government, which is very sensible and very true. It was to the effect that they could not possibly go on much longer, as they clearly had not the confidence of the mass of those who were called their supporters; that they were placed in a false position, and that their measures appeared to be more suitable to the principles of their opponents than to those of their own party; that in all the great questions--agricultural, fiscal, educational, and Irish--this was evidently the case, and that on all of them the Tories or Conservatives were years behind their leaders. The truth is that the Government is Peel, that Peel is a reformer and more of a Whig than a Tory, and that the mass of his followers are prejudiced, ignorant, obstinate, and selfish. In his speech the other night he certainly said nothing calculated to coax or soothe his angry people, and still less did he utter a word about finality, or give out that this was to be the limit of concession; and everybody is now beginning to see that this beginning of endowment must lead to still larger measures, and eventually to the complete establishment of the Roman Catholic Church; in short (as I hope and believe) to the measures which my book contemplates and recommends.