Jules Simon m'a promis une note qui me servirait à soutenir vos titres, et me permettrait de dire aux Français de ma section, passablement ignorants de l'étranger, avec exactitude ce que vous avez fait.
Meantime the Journal notes:—
December 7th.—Meeting of the Liberal-Unionist party. On the 11th, dinner at home. Duc d'Aumale, Froude, Carnarvon, Lady Stanley, Colonel Knollys, F. Villiers, Lady Metcalfe, Newton.
19th—Dined at the Duc d'Aumale's, who had bought Moncorvo House in Ennismore Gardens. Comte and Comtesse de Paris, Haussonville, Ségur, Target, Audiffret, Leighton.
December 21st.—To Timsbury. 24th, to Foxholes. The Ogilvies there.
1887. January 3rd.—Came to London. 10th, dinner at Pender's to meet Stanley, the African traveller, before he went to find Emin Bey.
19th.—The third part of Greville published, 3,007 copies subscribed.
Among the many letters which the publication of these last volumes of the 'Greville Memoirs' brought him, the following from Sir Arthur Gordon [Footnote: Fourth son of the Earl of Aberdeen.]—now Lord Stanmore, and then Governor of Ceylon—have a peculiar interest from their exact criticism of a point of detail with which the writer was personally acquainted at first hand:—
Queen's House, Colombo, June 18th.
My dear Mr. Reeve,—I have very long delayed answering your last letter, in the hope that, when I did so, I might at the same time be able to send you my notes on the two last volumes of 'Greville.' But these notes will be numerous, and my time is scant for such work. On one point, the 'graspingness' alleged to have been shown by the Peclites after the formation of the Government in December 1852, and its modification to satisfy their exigencies, I have felt constrained to address the 'Times.' [Footnote: June 13th. The letter is reprinted in the Appenduxm post, p. 411.] The truth happens to have been exactly the other way, and Greville's notes are only the echo of the grumblings of the disappointed Whig placemen who talked to him. It is decidedly unjust not only to my father, Graham, and Gladstone, who are indirectly charged with this trafficking, but to the Duke of Newcastle and Herbert also, who more directly are so.