Chapter XIII (3)

A drawing-room yesterday, at which the Princess Victoria made her first appearance. I was not there. Lady Jersey made a scene with Lord Durham. She got up and crossed the room to him and said, 'Lord Durham, I hear that you have said things about me which are not true, and I desire that you will call upon me to-morrow with a witness to hear my positive denial, and I beg that you will not repeat any such things about me,' or, as the Irishman said, 'words to that effect.' She was in a fury, and he, I suppose, in a still greater. He muttered that he should never set foot in her house again, which she did not hear, as after delivering herself of her speech she flounced back again to her seat, mighty proud of the exploit. It arose out of his saying that he should make Lady Durham demand an audience of the Queen to contradict the things Lady Jersey had said of her and the other Whig ladies.

I saw Lady Jersey last night and had a long conversation with her about her squabbles. She declares solemnly (and I believe it) that she never said a syllable to the Queen against her quondam friends, owns she abused Sefton to other people, cried, and talked, and the end was that I am to try to put an end to these _tracasseries_. She was mighty glorious about her _sortie_ upon Lambton, whom she dislikes, but she is vexed at the hornets' nest she has brought round her head. All this comes of talking. The wisest man mentioned in history was the vagrant in the Tuileries Gardens some years ago, who walked about with a gag on, and when taken up by the police and questioned why he went about in that guise, he said he was imprudent, and that he might not say anything to get himself into jeopardy he had adopted this precaution. I wonder what Lambton would say now about appointing others instead of Palmerston and Co. if they should go out, which he talked of as such an easy and indifferent matter. What arrogance and folly there is in the world! I don't know how long this will last, but it must end in Peel's being Prime Minister. What a foolish proverb that is that 'honesty is the best policy!'

I am just come home from breakfasting with Henry Taylor to meet Wordsworth; the same party as when he had Southey--Mill, Elliot, Charles Villiers. Wordsworth may be bordering on sixty; hard-featured, brown, wrinkled, with prominent teeth and a few scattered grey hairs, but nevertheless not a disagreeable countenance; and very cheerful, merry, courteous, and talkative, much more so than I should have expected from the grave and didactic character of his writings. He held forth on poetry, painting, politics, and metaphysics, and with a great deal of eloquence; he is more conversible and with a greater flow of animal spirits than Southey. He mentioned that he never wrote down as he composed, but composed walking, riding, or in bed, and wrote down after; that Southey always composes at his desk. He talked a great deal of Brougham, whose talents and domestic virtues he greatly admires; that he was very generous and affectionate in his disposition, full of duty and attention to his mother, and had adopted and provided for a whole family of his brother's children, and treats his wife's children as if they were his own. He insisted upon taking them both with him to the drawing-room the other day when he went in state as Chancellor. They remonstrated with him, but in vain.