go on until Doomsday before the 'tails' exceed the 'heads,' or the 'heads' exceed the 'tails,' by ninety-five. I found this system in a letter from Condorcet to a friend, which I read in a book that I purchased at a stall on the 'Quai' at Paris. It may have been, as I have said, only luck; but all I can say is, that whenever I played it I invariably won." One of Mr. Labouchere's oldest friends, Mrs. Crawford, recently wrote to me a letter in which she made the following lucid remarks about his career in the Diplomatic Service: "I was acquainted," she says, "with many of his diplomatic comrades, and they often spoke of him in chat with me. Some were friendly, some were not. He had a very unguarded tongue, and discharged his shafts of satire, irony, humour in all directions, and every arrow that hit made an {67} enemy. I, mentally, used to take this into account in judging of their judgments, and the habit, which does not exist in England, of searching for mitigating circumstances helped me to make a fair and true estimate of his complex nature. I think he rather enjoyed, but _passagèrement_, being thought a Richard III., an Iago--an inveterate gambler. I soon came to the conclusion that this was partly due to a reaction against the idolatrous attitude of the English middle class and religious people towards Victoria and Albert, for it was shockingly fulsome--and the Queen early showed hostility towards him. His uncle, Lord Taunton, reflected her known sentiments, and so did Lord Clarendon. He was wrong, very wrong, to have treated the vile crime of Grenville Murray, and committed too in an Office capacity, as a thing of no consequence and the stumble made by an exceedingly clever man--a too great rarity in the British Consular Service. I have some recollection that she was furious with the Prince of Wales, who had not the virtue, in his early years at any rate, of reticence in speaking, for, on the authority of Mr. Labouchere, taking Grenville Murray's part against the Foreign Office in her presence. This, however, was only one of the reasons of her fixed hostility...."