No further advance has been made towards the arrangements, but it is clear peace will be made. George Grey told me so yesterday, and intimated as much as that small difficulties must and would be got over. France, Austria, and Russia are resolved on peace, and England cannot alone make herself an obstacle. I suppose it will end in some compromise upon the points remaining in dispute.
Macaulay has retired from Parliament, where he had done nothing since his last election; he hardly ever attended and never spoke, or certainly not more than once. It is to be hoped his life will be spared to bring down his history to the end of Queen Anne's reign, which is all that can possibly be expected.
_January 31st._--Parliament meets to-day. Who would have thought a few weeks ago that the Queen's Speech would announce the preliminaries of peace? Who would ever have thought that tidings of peace would produce a general sentiment of disappointment and dissatisfaction in this nation? There are, however, sundry symptoms of an approaching change in the public mind. The press is much perplexed; the newspapers do not know what to say. They confidently predicted that there would be no peace, and urged the people to go on clamouring for war as long as they could; but since they have seen that their noise is ineffectual, and that peace is inevitable, they have nearly left off inveighing against it, because doing so without any result only exhibits their own impotence, which is just what they most wish to avoid. They therefore now confine themselves to a sort of undergrowl, muttering abuse against Russia and Austria, calling out for more stringent terms, and still indulging in a desperate hope that some unexpected difficulty may occur to break off the negotiations and plunge us into war again. The Opposition are as much perplexed as the press, and do not know what course to take, or what is the most vulnerable part of the Government, and they are not agreed among themselves.
So in the meantime they seem disposed to vent themselves in a fierce attack on Baron Parke's Life Peerage. This peerage has excited great wrath even in many who are friendly to the Government, and probably in all who are unfriendly. Amongst those who most vehemently resent it are Lord Campbell, Lord Lyndhurst, and, as I am told, Brougham. There is much to be said about it either way, and it will probably give rise to some good debates and not uninteresting.