and at the great meeting at Eglinton's such manifestations of resentment were made on that account as to make it nearly impossible (for in these days nothing is quite impossible) for any future attempt at reconciliation and reunion to be made. _March 11th._--A fresh shuffling of the cards is being arranged by which Frederick Peel is to go to the Treasury, _vice_ Wilson, Vice President of the Board of Trade; Sir Robert to the War Department, _vice_ his brother; and Henry Brand to the Admiralty. Palmerston seemed to consider all the blunders he made about these offices rather a good joke than a mischievous _gaucherie_. 'Ha, ha!' he said, 'a Comedy of Errors.' George Lewis told me this morning he thinks the temper of the House of Commons more favourable, and, if he can succeed in producing a palateable Budget, that they may get on; he told me the revenue was extremely flourishing and the country very rich, but the expenses are enormous. He means to meet them by a loan, but the question is of what amount, and how much of the additional expense shall be provided by it. He will want ninety millions to cover the whole. LORD CLARENDON AND THE EMPEROR NAPOLEON. Clarendon was much pleased with his visit to the Emperor, who talked to him very frankly and unreservedly about everything. They lit their cigars and sat and talked with the greatest ease. He said the Emperor spoke to him about the English press, and all he said was sensible and true; that he was aware that a free press was a necessity in England, and as indispensable as the Constitution itself, and that he had hitherto believed that the editors of the principal newspapers had the good of their country at heart, and always acted from conscientious motives; but that he could no longer entertain that opinion. The press during the past months, and the 'Times' particularly, had done an incalculable amount of mischief to England and to the alliance between us. The effect produced by their language in Germany was most injurious, and of service only to Russia. When the English papers talked of their own country in the way they did, of its degradation and disgrace, its maladministration, the ruin of its military power, and the loss of all that makes a nation great and powerful, though he (the Emperor) knew what all this meant, and how much or how little of truth there was in such exaggerated statements, yet in France they were generally believed, and it became very difficult for him to reconcile the nation to an alliance for which he was reproached with making sacrifices and shaping his policy in accordance with our's, when it was evident from our own showing that our alliance was not worth having, and our impotence was so exposed that, whenever peace should put an end to the necessity of the alliance, we should be entirely at their mercy; and while such was the feeling in France, in Germany it was still stronger, and there the 'Times' had succeeded in creating a universal conviction that we are in