_February 2nd._--I dined with George Harcourt on Saturday, and sat next to Macaulay at dinner, when we talked about the measure, and what the Whigs should do. He was all for urging immediate repeal. I told him they must take care not to put the measure itself in jeopardy, and suggested my own view of what Peel might do, and what Lord John ought to do after his letter to the Queen. He said, on the first point, that he certainly would rather give up pressing for immediate repeal than endanger the measure, but that if Peel would consider a vote carried against him on that point so seriously as to induce him to throw it up or resign, he ought to say so; he ought to take an opportunity of giving them notice as to what he would regard in so serious a light, that they might at least understand what they were about. As to the second point, he said he was sure John Russell did not see it as I did, and that not one of the eighteen or twenty persons who were assembled the other day at his house took that view of it; that he apprehended all Lord John meant was to intimate to the Queen that if he did not succeed in improving the Bill in committee (which he was entirely at liberty to do as he thought best), he should be content to take it as the Government might have framed it. I said that I could not possibly put any such construction on it, and that it seemed hardly worth his while to tell the Queen that if he could not alter it he would take it unaltered, which he could not help doing; and I argued that taking it with the context of the letter, and with what had previously passed, I thought nothing but the greatest sophistry could put any other meaning on it than this--that though Peel's measure might not be the same as his would have been, nevertheless he would support it; that he would not insist as the condition of his support that it should be exactly the same: and, therefore, to attack it in an essential part, and the part he had specified as that which he should not insist upon, would be a hostile move, and if successful might have very serious consequences. [Sidenote: IMMEDIATE REPEAL.]