offered to him _consensu omnium_, that his scruples would be insurmountable. So certain are they of taking Sebastopol that they have already begun to discuss what they shall do with it when they have got it. Palmerston wrote Clarendon a long letter setting forth the various alternatives, and expressing his own opinion that the Crimea should be restored to the Turks. Clarendon is dead against this, and so, he told me, is Stratford. At Boulogne the Emperor and Newcastle agreed that the best course will be to occupy the Crimea and garrison Sebastopol with a large force of English and French, and hold it _en dépôt_ till they can settle something definitive; and Clarendon leans to this arrangement, which will at least be a gain of time. VISIT OF PRINCE ALBERT TO FRANCE. _London, September 19th._--At The Grove again last week, where as usual I heard a great deal of miscellaneous matters from Clarendon and read a great many despatches from different people. I asked him what the Prince had told him of his visit to Boulogne, and what his opinion was of the Emperor. He said the Prince had talked to him a great deal about it all at Osborne, and this is the substance of what he said as far as I recollect it: The Prince was very well satisfied with his reception; the Emperor took him in his carriage _tête à tête_ to the great review, so that they conversed together long and without interruption or witnesses. The Emperor seems to have talked to the Prince with more _abandon_ and unreserve than is usual to him. The Prince was exceedingly struck with his extreme apathy and languor (which corresponds with what Thiers told me of him) and with his ignorance of a variety of matters which it peculiarly behoved him to know. He asked the Prince a great many questions about the English Constitution and its working, relating to which the Prince gave him ample and detailed explanation, and Clarendon said that all that he repeated as being said to the Emperor was as good, sound, and correct as it possibly could be. The Emperor said that he felt all the difficulties of his own position, and enlarged upon them with great freedom, particularly adverting, as one of them, to the absence of any aristocracy in France. The Prince, in reply to this, seems to have given him very judicious advice; for he told him that any attempt to _create_ an aristocracy in France resembling that of England must be a failure, the conditions and antecedents of the two countries being so totally dissimilar; that he might confer titles and distinctions to any amount, and so surround himself with adherents whom he had obliged, but that he had better confine himself to that and not attempt to do more. When they parted, the Emperor said he hoped it would not be the last time he should have the pleasure of seeing His Royal Highness, to which the Prince replied that he hoped not, and that he was charged by the Queen to express her hope that he would pay her a visit