We had a Council yesterday for the parting Speech, and to-day this long session, the longest and most tedious ever known, closes. On Wednesday last, Disraeli with a great flourish of trumpets and note of preparation delivered an oration _‡ la_ Lyndhurst, of three hours long, to which John Russell made a pretty good reply. Dizzy's speech was very sparkling and clever, but it was, after all, nothing but a theatrical display, without object or meaning but to show off his own powers. It was prefaced by a sort of advertisement that the great actor would take his benefit that morning on the stage of St. Stephen's; an audience was collected, and he sent word to Delane that he was going to speak in order that he might have one of his best reporters there. He quizzed Charles Wood unmercifully, and showed up a good many of the blunders and really stupid things which the Government did in the course of the session. _September 22nd._--No sooner was Parliament up than every creature took flight, and London became more empty and deserted than ever I saw it. [Sidenote: DEATH OF LORD GEORGE BENTINCK.] _September 28th._--I was about to record my own proceedings and such other scraps as occurred to me, when my mind was diverted from all other topics by the intelligence of the death of George Bentinck.[69] This event was so strange and sudden, that it could not fail to make a very great sensation in the world, and so it did. It would be false and hypocritical were I to pretend that it affected me personally with any feeling of affliction, but I can say with truth that I was much shocked, and that I was sincerely sorry for it. I was sorry for the heavy blow thus inflicted on his father and his family, and it was impossible not to regard with compassion and something of regret the sudden termination of a career which promised to be one of no small prosperity and success. He was in truth a very remarkable man, of very singular character and disposition, and his history is one very much out of the common way. I am in one respect better, and in another worse, fitted to describe him than any other person, for nobody knew him so intimately and so well as I once did, nobody is so well acquainted with his most private thoughts and feelings as well as with his most secret practices; but, on the other hand, I should never be deemed an impartial biographer of a man from whom I had been so long and completely estranged, and between whom and myself there existed such strong feelings of alienation and dislike. Nevertheless, I will try to describe him as I think he really was, nothing extenuating, and nothing setting down in malice. The world will and must form a very incorrect estimate of his character; more of what was good than of what was bad in it was known to the public; he had the credit of virtues which he did not possess, or which were so mixed with vices that if all had been known he would have been most severely