_November 2nd._--Gout in my hand has prevented my writing anything, and adding some trifling particulars to what I have written above. In the meantime has arrived the news of the capture of Delhi, but though we have received it now a week ago we are still unacquainted with the particulars. All the advantages of the electric telegraph are dearly paid for by the agonies of suspense which are caused by the long intervals between the arrival of general facts and of their particular details. It still remains to be seen whether the results of this success turn out on the whole to be as advantageous as it appears to be brilliant. The Press goes on attacking Canning with great asperity and injustice, and nobody here defends him. Though I am not a very intimate or particular friend of his, I think him so unfairly and ungenerously treated that I mean to make an effort to get him such redress as the case admits of, and the only thing which occurs to me is that Palmerston, as head of the Government, should take the opportunity of the Lord Mayor's dinner to vindicate him, and assume the responsibility of his acts. His 'Clemency' proclamation, as it is stupidly and falsely called, was, I believe, not only proper and expedient, but necessary, and I expect he will be able to vindicate himself completely from all the charges which the newspapers have brought against him, but in the meantime they will have done him all the mischief they can. Amongst other things Clarendon told me at The Grove, he said, in reference to Canning's war against the press, that the license of the Indian press was intolerable, not of the native press only, but the English in Bengal. Certain papers are conducted there by low, disaffected people, who publish the most gross, false, and malignant attacks on the Government, which are translated into the native languages, and read extensively in the native regiments, and amongst the natives generally, and that to put down this pest was an absolute necessity. _November 4th._--I have been speaking to Granville about Canning, and urged him to move Palmerston to stand forth in his defence at the Lord Mayor's dinner on the 9th. This morning he received a very strong and pressing letter from Clanricarde, in the same sense in which I had been urging him, and a very good letter, and this he is going to send to Palmerston. Clanricarde is struck, as I am, with the fact that nobody and no newspaper has said a word in Canning's favour, and he sees as I have done all the damage which has already been done to him by the long and uncontradicted course of abuse and reproach with which the press has teemed.