_November 23rd._--After long delay and apparently much hesitation James Wortley has accepted the Solicitor-Generalship. He consulted Gladstone and Sidney Herbert, neither of them very eligible advisers on such a question. Gladstone is said to have replied that he would run a great risk as to his pecuniary interests, but if he could support the foreign policy of the Government, there was no reason why he should not accept. He retains his rank of Privy Councillor, of which I doubt the fitness, as it places him at all events in a very anomalous position, for the law officers are the official advisers of the Privy Council and are often called upon to sit there as assessors. However, the Judges are said to have pronounced an opinion that there is no reason why he should not plead in any of the courts. It is said, and I believe truly, that now Cockburn has taken the irretrievable step he is very sorry for it, and is more struck by the necessary consequences of his promotion than he was at first. He has all his life been a very debauched fellow, but he is clever, good-natured, and of a liberal disposition and much liked by his friends. A story is told of him that he was in the habit of going down on Sundays to Richmond or elsewhere with a woman, and generally with a different one, and the landlady of the inn he went to remembered that Sir A. Cockburn always brought Lady Cockburn with him, but that she never saw any woman who looked so different on different days, and this gave rise to another story. When Lord Campbell went to some such place with Lady Stratheden (who had been raised to the peerage before her husband), the mistress of the house said that Sir A. Cockburn always brought _Lady Cockburn_ with him, but that the Chief Justice brought another lady and not _Lady Campbell_. While we have meetings perpetually held and innumerable writings put forth to promote education and raise the moral standard of the people, we are horrified and alarmed day after day by accounts of the most frightful murders, colossal frauds, and crimes of every description. War has ceased, though the Temple of Janus seems only to be ajar; but the world is still in commotion, in alarm, and visited by every sort of calamity, moral and material, in the midst of which it is difficult to discover any signs of the improvement of the human race, even of those portions of it which are supposed to be the most civilised and the most progressive. [Sidenote: A DIPLOMATIC IMBROGLIO.]