The solemn, and withal somewhat ponderous rebukes, which Lord Palmerston
has drawn down upon himself from the German Diet and the Russian Government are natural enough. The off- hand style in which our perpetual Foreign Secretary encounters his rivals and opponents in Parliament, he has before now carried into his official correspondence, but never to such an extent as when, instead of a despatch in his own name, he forwarded the pamphlet of a Conservative statesman out of office to all the leading powers of Europe,—as ifto say, See how even our Tories speak about one ofyour brother sovereigns! This was an innovation upon the grave formalities of diplomacy, which might have been overlooked in a tyro, but was intolerable in a statesman who has been in office ever since he came of age, nearly fifty years ago. In Lord Malmesbury's Diary we find recorded the soreness felt by the veteran statesman at the joking propensities of the young men of his party—to wit, Canning and Palmerston. The Russian and German diplomatists find the survivor of the pair as vivacious and as annoying after nearly half a century more has passed over his head. It must be confessed that the freak of our Foreign Secretary had in it a strong dash of the Etonian schoolboy : nevertheless, Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet contains matter that deserves the serious attention of the Despotic Courts.
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