gratitude." Voyez, mon cher Monsieur, comme depuis 8 jours ces pauvres
Deputes qui ont vote pour le Ministre sont traites, Si vous etes a la
maison ce soir, dites-le-moi, je desire vous parler. Dinez-vous
chez-vous?

Votre devoue,

DE H.

The following announcement was published by Mr. Disraeli in reply to
certain criticisms of his work:

"I cannot allow myself to omit certain observations of my able critic
without remarking that those omissions are occasioned by no
insensibility to their acuteness.

"Circumstances of paramount necessity render it quite impossible that
anything can proceed from my pen hostile to the general question of
_Reform_.

"Independent however of all personal considerations, and viewing the
question of Reform for a moment in the light in which my critic
evidently speculates, I would humbly suggest that the cause which he
advocates would perhaps be more united in the present pages by being
passed over _in silence_. It is important that this work should be a
work not of _party_ but of national interest, and I am induced to
believe that a large class in this country, who think themselves bound
to support the present administration from a superficial sympathy with
their domestic measures, have long viewed their foreign policy with
distrust and alarm.

"If the public are at length convinced that Foreign Policy, instead of
being an abstract and isolated division of the national interests, is in
fact the basis of our empire and present order, and that this basis
shakes under the unskilful government of the Cabinet, the public may be
induced to withdraw their confidence from that Cabinet altogether.

"With this exception, I have adopted all the additions and alterations
that I have yet had the pleasure of seeing without reserve, and I seize
this opportunity of expressing my sense of their justness and their
value.

"_The Author of 'Gallomania_.'" [Footnote: Several references are made
to "Contarini Fleming" and "Gallomania" in "Lord Beaconsfield's Letters
to his Sister," published in 1887.]

The next person whom we shall introduce to the reader was one who had
but little in common with Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, except that, like him,
he had at that time won little of that world-wide renown which he was
afterwards to achieve. This "writer of books," as he described himself,
was no other than Thomas Carlyle, who, when he made the acquaintance of
Mr. Murray, had translated Goethe's "Wilhelm Meist