and stimulate the exertions of the Opposition, and we may expect to see not a coalition, but such a concurrence between Gladstone, Disraeli, and Lord Stanley as will prevent the possibility of an alternative Government. Gladstone and Disraeli are already on friendly terms, and Gladstone and Stanley seem to be still more intimate. The present Government only exists by Palmerston's personal popularity, and it would not require much to pull that down. _February 17th._--I called on Lyndhurst on Sunday. He was in high force, with the Blue Book before him, getting up the China case, on which he means to have a day in the House of Lords. He told me that Gladstone says the Budget is the worst that was ever produced, and he stakes his credit on proving that it is full of errors from beginning to end, that, instead of a present surplus of nearly a million, there is a present deficit of four millions, and that there will be one of nine millions in 1860. I don't believe he will make his words good. [Sidenote: DIFFICULT RELATIONS WITH FRANCE.] I saw Clarendon yesterday morning, and found him low, worn, and out of sorts; said he wished to Heaven he could be delivered from office; everything went wrong, the labour, anxiety, and responsibility were overwhelming, and the difficult state of our relations with France more than could be endured. He could not depend on the French Government, and never knew from one day to another what the consequences of their conduct might be. He believed the Emperor sincerely desired to keep well with us, but his Government were constantly doing things which rendered our acting together and cordially almost impossible; that his excessive levity and carelessness perpetually made him the dupe of other people, and led him into saying things and committing himself, and then he did not know how to get out of the engagements to which he stood committed. Clarendon added that it was impossible such a state of things should not produce first coolness and then quarrels, and then God knows what consequences, and he was obliged to pick his way through the embarrassments that spring up around him with the utmost care and circumspection. Palmerston, who never saw difficulties, took it with his usual easy way, and said we were not tied to France like Siamese Twins, and why should we care so much what she did, and why might she not take her way, and we ours; but Clarendon feels that it is impossible for him, on whom the responsibility is more immediately thrown, to take a matter fraught with such consequences in so easy a style; that if any serious dispute arose, France and Russia would probably become allied against us, and that America would join them. Russia pays the most unceasing and the most abject court to Louis Napoleon, and not without success. He (Clarendon) said nothing could be worse than the conduct of the French Government about the affair of the Principalities, which was of vital importance to Austria, who