_November 10th_.--After a lapse of nearly three months I resume my notices of past and present events, these three months having furnished very little matter worth recording nearly up to the present time. For the last month, however, the world has been sufficiently agitated, on different accounts and in different places, to afford ample opportunity for either description or comment even to the most superficial observer. I might, however, I have very little doubt, write that which would be acceptable to one person or another by recording my own personal experiences and the communications that I have with different people on different matters, which certainly are ludicrously miscellaneous. Some people like politics, some gossip, and almost all like political gossip. I have had within these few weeks consultations and communications on the most opposite subjects: men coming to be helped out of scrapes with other men's wives, adjustments of domestic squabbles, a grand bother about the Duke of Cambridge's _status_ in the House of Lords, a fresh correspondence with Lady Palmerston about the 'Times' attacking her husband, communication from Cardinal Wiseman about the troubled state of ecclesiastical affairs, and so forth; odds and ends not altogether uninteresting, and making a strange miscellany in my mind. It is needless to attempt to say anything about the solution of the German question, touching which I have no private information whatever.[125] It is a drama, at which all the world is audience, and I have not been behind the scenes. I think we have played a very paltry part in it, and Palmerston's policy and conduct are so unintelligible to me that I shall say nothing about them. I agree in all that the 'Times' has written thereon, and its strictures have hit hard, as is evident by the resentment expressed by Lady Palmerston. [Footnote 125: [The German question relates to the proceedings which had arisen out of the Frankfort Convention, the Schleswig-Holstein quarrel, and the dispute in Hesse, which nearly led to war. Lord Palmerston was strongly opposed to the views taken by the Court on these German questions.]]