the Council Office, more busy
writing a review of Lady Charlotte Bury's book than with the
matter before the Judicial Committee. He writes this with
inconceivable rapidity, seldom corrects, and never reads over
what he has written, but packs it up and despatches it rough from
his pen to Macvey Napier. He is in exuberant spirits and full of
talk, and certainly marvellously agreeable. His talk (for
conversation is not the word for it) is totally unlike that of
anybody else I ever heard. It comes forth without the slightest
effort, provided he is in spirits and disposed to talk at all. It
is the spontaneous outpouring of one of the most fertile and
restless of minds, easy, familiar, abundant, and discursive. The
qualities and peculiarities of mind which mar his oratorical,
give zest and effect to his conversational, powers; for the
perpetual bubbling up of fresh ideas, by incapacitating him from
condensing his speeches, often makes them tediously digressive
and long; but in society he treads the ground with so elastic a
step, he touches everything so lightly and so adorns all that he
touches, his turns and his breaks are so various, unexpected, and
pungent, that he not only interests and amuses, but always
exhilarates his audience so as to render weariness and satiety
impossible. He is now coquetting a little with the Tories, and
especially professes great deference and profound respect for the
Duke of Wellington; his sole object in politics, for the moment,
is to badger, twit, and torment the Ministry, and in this he
cannot contain himself within the bounds of common civility, as
he exemplified the other night when he talked of 'Lord John this
and Mr. Spring that' (on Thursday night), which, however
contemptuous, was too undignified to be effective. He calls this
'the Thomson Government' from its _least_ considerable member.

February 25th, 1838 {p.066}

[Page Head: O'CONNELL AT THE CROWN AND ANCHOR.]

Lord John Russell made a very paltry exhibition on Friday night,
quite unworthy of the fame he had acquired and of the situation
he holds. When Lord Maidstone threatened to bring before the
House the language which O'Connell had used (about the perjury in
Committees) in a speech at the 'Crown and Anchor,'[8] and gave
notice of a motion for that purpose, John jumped up and said, if
he persevered in this motion he would call the attention of the
House to an imputation against the Catholic members contained in
a charge