Day after day the accounts from the Crimea represent a more deplorable state of things, entirely confirmative of Canrobert's statements to his own Government, and it is difficult to read them and not apprehend some fatal catastrophe. We know nothing of the state of the Russians either within or without Sebastopol, and this ignorance is not one of the least remarkable circumstances in this war, but we must conclude either that their condition is as bad as our's, and that they are unable to attack us, or that their policy is to let the winter do its work, and that they do not think it necessary for them to fight sanguinary battles with very doubtful results when disease is ravaging the allied army and producing effects as advantageous for them as the most complete victories could do, as surely, only more gradually. ABORTIVE NEGOTIATIONS. _January 22nd._--Every day one looks with anxiety to see and to hear whether the chances of peace look well or ill, and at present they look very ill. Clarendon seems to set his face against it--that is, he considers it hopeless; and it is not promising that the negotiations should be under the management of one who has no hopes of bringing them to a successful issue, and whose despair of it evidently arises from his determination to exact conditions that there is no chance of obtaining. I hear, too, this morning, that the instructions to Bourqueney are to be as _exigeant_ as possible--not very wise pretensions anyhow, but they rather indicate the tone adopted by England than the real intentions of France, for it is one thing to make great demands and another to persist in them. It is, however, idle to speculate on the progress of a negotiation which must be so largely influenced by the operations and events of the war. Parliament meets tomorrow, and I think a very short time will elapse before the fate of the Government is decided by some vote about the conduct of the war. I think the Government themselves desire it, and, conscious of the state of public opinion and of the deplorable state of affairs, and most of them thinking there has been great and fatal mismanagement, they wish the question to be decided, would not be sorry to be driven out by an adverse vote, and consider that it would be a better and more respectable way of ending than by those internal dissensions, which, like a cancer, are continually undermining them. John Russell sees nothing but difficulties in the formation of another Government of a Whig complexion including a large portion of the present Ministers, and says that he does not think Lord Lansdowne _would_, or that he or Palmerston _could_ accomplish it. He means now to stand by his colleagues, to accept his share of responsibility, and defend what has been done.