The Duke of St. Alban's was attacked on Thursday in
the House of Lords by the Duke of Richmond, for bringing the Queen's name into the thick of party conflict at the Nottingham banquet of last week, and did not make matters better by pro- viding himself with a eulogy of the Duke of Wellington's on Lord Melbourne's training of the. Queen, for the same reason, as he said, for which an American carpenter, a party to an assault case, had measured the distance be- tween the assailant and the victim of the assault, at the time the aggressor advanced to strike the blow,—namely, in the expectation that " some fool might ask the question." Of course the Duke of Richmond regarded this as equivalent to calling him a fool, which the Duke of St. Alban's denied. But if he did not mean this, where was the point of the story? Earl Cowper quoted Lord Salisbury's precedent for so rude an imputa- tion, Lord Salisbury having said only the other day that there were probably more than 2f per cent. of fools in either House of Parliament ; —but then Lord Salisbury gave every one the chance of believing himself to belong to the 97f per cent.. of wise men, and the Duke of St. Alban's had levelled his con- tumelious vocative with some precision against his brother Duke. On the whole, the discussion came to this,—that the Duke of St. Alban's had been very thoughtless to attribute to the Queen a preference for Liberalism, which she has never betrayed and ought never to betray even if she really feels it ; and quite as thought- less to attribute to the Duke of Richmond a preference for folly, because he took him mildly to task for his thoughtlessness. His Grace of Richmond is certainly not a fool at all. On the con- trary, he performs the dull duties of his post with almost elephantine conscientiousness and gravity.
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