alone.  Ten to one he is piqued by your overpowering him before a company.  Denison was agreeable enough.  I heard only one word from Lord Plunket, who was remarkably silent.  He spoke of Doctor Thorpe, and said that, having heard the Doctor in Dublin, he should like to hear him again in London.  “Nothing easier,” quoth Littleton; “his chapel is only two doors off; and he will be just mounting the pulpit.”  “No,” said Lord Plunket; “I can’t lose my dinner.”  An excellent saying, though one which a less able man than Lord Plunket might have uttered.

At midnight I walked away with George Lamb, and went—­where for a ducat?  “To bed,” says Miss Hannah.  Nay, my sister, not so; but to Brooks’s.  There I found Sir James Macdonald; Lord Duncannon, who had left Littleton’s just before us; and many other Whigs and ornaments of human nature.  As Macdonald and I were rising to depart we saw Rogers, and I went to shake hands with him.  You cannot think how kind the old man was to me.  He shook my hand over and over, and told me that Lord Plunket longed to see me in a quiet way, and that he would arrange a breakfast party in a day or two for that purpose.

Away I went from Brooks’s—­but whither?  “To bed now, I am sure,” says little Anne.  No, but on a walk with Sir James Macdonald to the end of Sloane Street, talking about the Ministry, the Reform Bill, and the East India question.

Ever yours

T. B. M.

To Hannah M. Macaulay.

House of Commons Smoking Room:  Saturday.

My dear Sister,—­The newspapers will have, explained the reason of our sitting to-day.  At three this morning I left the House.  At two this afternoon I have returned to it, with the thermometer at boiling heat, and four hundred and fifty people stowed together like negroes in the John Newton’s slaveship.  I have accordingly left Sir Francis Burdett on his legs, and repaired to the smoking-room; a large, wainscoted, uncarpeted place, with tables covered with green baize and writing materials.  On a full night it is generally thronged towards twelve o’clock with smokers.  It is then a perfect cloud of fume.  There have I seen, (tell it not to the West Indians,) Buxton blowing fire out of his mouth.  My father will not believe it.  At present, however, all the doors and windows are open, and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself.

Get Blackwood’s new number.  There is a description of me in it.  What do you think he says that I am?  “A little, splay-footed, ugly, dumpling of a fellow, with a mouth from ear to ear.”  Conceive how such a charge must affect a man so enamoured of his own beauty as I am.