While Macaulay is thus ascending to the House of Peers, his old enemy and rival Croker has descended to the grave, very noiselessly and almost without observation, for he had been for some time so withdrawn from the world that he was nearly forgotten. He had lived to see all his predictions of ruin and disaster to the country completely falsified. He continued till the last year or two to exhale his bitterness and spite in the columns of the 'Quarterly Review,' but at last the Editor (who had long been sick of his contributions) contrived to get rid of him. I never lived in any intimacy with him, and seldom met him in society, but he certainly occupied a high place among the second-rate men of his time; he had very considerable talents, great industry, with much information and a retentive memory. He spoke in Parliament with considerable force, and in society his long acquaintance with the world and with public affairs, and his stores of general knowledge made him entertaining, though he was too overbearing to be agreeable. He was particularly disliked by Macaulay, who never lost an opportunity of venting his antipathy by attacks upon him. [Sidenote: HISTORY OF THE LIFE PEERAGES.] _Holwood, September 10th._--I came here on Tuesday on a visit to the Chancellor.[1] This beautiful place formerly belonged to Mr. Pitt, and abounds in local recollections of the great Minister in the shape of 'Pitt's Oak,' 'Pitt's Well,' &c. It is close to Hayes, where his father, the great Lord Chatham, lived and died. Nobody is here but Pemberton Leigh.