apiece to the Lord Chamberlain, Master of Horse, and Lord Steward; boxes and watches to others, and he left 1,500_l._ with Charles Murray to be distributed among the three classes of servants at the Palace. The Queen's speech was much like all others, but derived an interest from the notice about Corn.[32] The secret of the measure has been so well kept, that up to this time nobody knows what they are going to propose. The Opposition, people affect to consider it a great triumph for them, and that the Government are disgraced by the adoption of measures so similar to those by which their predecessors fell; but they treat the question as if nothing else had ever been laid to the charge of the late Government, and pass over (as they are quite right, in a party sense, to do) the fact that they were at their last gasp when they flung down their Budget, and that there were plenty of other causes for turning them out. It must be owned, however, that what is now going to happen is another exemplification of what I have long seen to be an established fact in politics--viz. that the Tories only can carry Liberal measures. The Whigs work, prepare, but cannot accomplish them; the Tories directly or indirectly thwart, discourage, and oppose them till public opinion compels them to submit, and then they are obliged to take them up, and to do that which they can do, but the Whigs cannot do. Francis Baring, who is come over from Paris to see Lord Ashburton before he goes, tells me that if Palmerston had continued for a year or two more at the Foreign Office, nothing, he is persuaded, could have prevented a war between us and France, for that he intrigued against France in every part of the world, and with a tenacity of purpose that was like insanity; he was constantly engaged in thwarting, counteracting, and insulting her, so that the exasperation against him and against this country was so great and universal that a collision would have been inevitable. [Footnote 32: [The paragraph in the speech which foreshadowed Sir Robert Peel's great commercial reforms, was a recommendation to Parliament to consider the laws relating to the importation of corn and other articles the produce of foreign countries. It was this clause which had caused the Duke of Buckingham to quit the Cabinet. He was succeeded as Lord Privy Seal by the Duke of Buccleuch.]] [Sidenote: SIR R. PEEL'S CORN BILL.]