Mr. Croker[213], Secretary to the Admiralty, famous as a speaker and as a writer, belonged, like Mr. Canning, to the school of Mr. Pitt; but he was more sophisticated than the latter. He occupied, at Whitehall, one of those gloomy apartments from which Charles I. had passed through a window to walk on the same level to the scaffold. One is astonished, in London, on entering the habitations where sit the directors of those establishments whose weight makes itself felt to the ends of the earth. A few men in black frock-coats sitting at a bare table: that is all you see; yet those are the directors of the British Navy, or the members of that company of merchants, the successors of the Mogul emperors, who number two-hundred millions of subjects in India. Mr. Croker came to visit me, two years ago, at the Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse. He pointed out to me the similarity of our opinions and of our destinies. Events separate us from the world; politics make solitaries, even as religion makes anchorites. When man dwells in the desert, he finds within himself some distant image of the Infinite Being who, living alone in immensity, sees the revolutions of the worlds accomplish themselves. In the course of the months of June and July, the affairs of Spain began seriously to occupy the Cabinet of London. Lord Londonderry and the majority of the ambassadors displayed a ludicrous anxiety and almost dread in talking of these affairs. The Ministry feared lest, in case of a rupture, we should get the better of the Spaniards; the ministers of the other Powers trembled lest we should be beaten: they still saw our army taking the tricolour cockade. [Sidenote: Dispatch on Spanish affairs.] In my dispatch of the 28th of June, No. 35, the dispositions of England are faithfully stated: No. 35. "LONDON, 28 _June_ 1822. "MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,