Granville had already told me the same thing. Aberdeen likes his post and enjoys the consciousness of having done very well in it. He is extremely liberal, but of a wise and well-reasoned liberality. As it has turned out, he is far fitter for the post he occupies than Lansdowne would have been, both morally and physically. The Queen is devoted to this Government, and expressed to Aberdeen the liveliest apprehension lest they should get themselves into some scrape with the India Bill, and entreated he would run no risks in it. Aberdeen, in announcing this one day to the Cabinet, said that the best thing for them to do was to bring forward a measure of so liberal and popular a character as to make any serious opposition impossible. Clarendon agreed in this, and I told him that this had long been my own idea, and that what they ought to do was to throw open the civil and military appointments to competition, and to grant appointments after examination to qualified candidates, just as degrees are given at the universities. We passed the whole evening together, talking over all matters of interest, and he told me everything he knew himself. [Footnote 1: Whilst these pacific assurances were given in London, Prince Menschikoff arrived in Constantinople on March 2, and commenced that arrogant and aggressive policy which led in the course of the year to hostilities between Russia and the Porte. It has, however, only recently transpired, by the publication of Lord Malmesbury's _Memoirs_ (vol. i. p. 402), that when the Emperor Nicholas came to England in 1844, he, Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Aberdeen, then Foreign Secretary, drew up and signed a Memorandum, the spirit and scope of which was to support Russia in her legitimate protection of the Greek religion and the holy shrines, and to do so without consulting France. To obtain this agreement was doubtless the object of the Emperor's journey. It bore his own personal signature. The existence of this Memorandum was a profound secret known only to the Queen and to those Ministers who held in succession the seals of the Foreign Department, each of whom transmitted it privately to his successor. Lord Malmesbury received the document from Lord Granville, and on leaving office in 1853 handed it to Lord John Russell. This fact, hitherto unknown, throws an entirely new light on the causes of the Crimean War. The Emperor of Russia naturally relied on the support of the very ministers who had signed the agreement and were again in power, whilst Lord Aberdeen was conscious of having entered into an engagement wholly at variance with the course of policy into which he was reluctantly driven.--H. R.]