But when it comes into operation how disappointed everybody
will be, and first of all the people! Their imaginations are
raised to the highest pitch, but they will open their eyes very
wide when they find no sort of advantage accruing to them, when
they are deprived of much of the expense and more of the
excitement of elections, and see a House of Commons constructed
after their own hearts, which will probably be an assembly in all
respects inferior to the present. Then they will not be
satisfied, and as it will be impossible to go back, there will be
plenty of agitators who will preach that we have not gone far
enough; and if a Reformed Parliament does not do all that popular
clamour shall demand, it will be treated with very little
ceremony. If, however, it be true that the tendency of this Bill
will be to throw power into the hands of the landed interest, we
shall have a great Tory party, which will be selfish, bigoted,
and ignorant, and a Radical party, while the Whig party, who will
have carried the measure, will sink into insignificance. Such
present themselves to my mind as possible alternatives, as far as
it is practicable to take anything like a view of probabilities
in the chaos and confusion that mighty alterations like these
produce.

I dined with Lord Grey on Sunday; they are all in high spirits.
Howick told his father that he had received a letter from some
merchant in the north praising the Bill, and saying he approved of
the whole Government except of Poulett Thomson. In the evening
Brougham, John Russell, and others arrived. I hear of Brougham
from Sefton, with whom he passes most of his spare time, to
relieve his mind by small talk, _persiflage_, and the gossip of
the day. He tells Sefton 'that he likes his office, but that it is
a mere plaything and there is nothing to do; his life is too idle,
and when he has cleared off the arrears, which he shall do
forthwith, that he really does not know how he shall get rid of
his time;' that 'he does not suffer the prolixity of counsel, and
when they wander from the point he brings them back and says, "You
need not say anything on that point; what I want to be informed
upon is so." He is a wonderful man, the most extraordinary I ever
saw, but there is more of the mountebank than of greatness in all
this. It may do well enough for Sefton, who is as ignorant as he
is sharp and shrewd, and captivated with his congenial offhandism,
but it requires something more