course, spoke in the same tone, Palmerston was very bad, and his speech was quite unbecoming his position. John Russell's defence was not calculated to relieve him from the weight of obloquy and unpopularity he had brought on himself, and the whole thing was unsatisfactory, except that it denoted the end of the contest and the disappointment of the Opposition, whose hopes had been so highly raised. APOLOGY FOR LORD JOHN. After much consideration of John Russell's conduct, I think it is not obnoxious to the severe censure with which it has been visited, and though he has committed errors, they are venial ones and admit of a fair explanation. Had not Buol's publication revealed to the world what had passed between them confidentially, nothing of it would have been known, and he would have been left to the enjoyment of the popularity he had gained by his anti-Russian speech. The statement about him in Buol's Circular naturally led to questions, and then it was necessary to tell everything and lay bare the arcana of Cabinets and Conferences; and when he endeavoured to explain his own conduct it became, amidst all the complexities of the case itself, its endless variety of details and confusion of dates, next to impossible to unravel it satisfactorily, and quite impossible to protect himself from the imputations which an unscrupulous and malignant assailant could easily contrive to bring against him; and in this great difficulty he displayed no tact and ingenuity in extricating himself from the dilemma in which he was placed; on the contrary, he went blundering on, exposing himself to many charges, all plausible and some true, of inconsistency, inaccuracy, and insincerity, and he made in his speeches a case against himself which left very little for his enemies to do. It might be strange in any other man, but is perhaps only consistent in him, that he is now more indignant with the friends who refused to follow and support him on this occasion than either ashamed or angry with himself for having blundered into such a scrape. He writes, meanwhile, to his brother, who has sent me his letter, in these terms:--'I have endeavoured to stand by and support Palmerston, too much so, I fear, for my own credit, but had I resigned on my return from Vienna, I should have been abused as wishing to trip him up and get his place: in short, the situation was one of those where only errors were possible. I have acted according to my own conscience; let that suffice.' False reasoning and wounded pride are both apparent in this letter, but he is quite right when he says that 'only errors had become possible.' There is no course he could have taken that would not have exposed him to bitter attacks and reproaches, and these unavoidable errors were not confined to himself. LORD JOHN'S CONDUCT AT VIENNA.